Say I to Myself: The Artistry of Self-Management [Reprint 2014 ed.] 9780674423343, 9780674499720

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SAY I TO MYSELF

LONDON : HUMPHREY M1LFORD OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Say I To Myself THE ARTISTRY OF SELF-MANAGEMENT

by Phillips Endecott Osgood

CAMBRIDGE : MASSACHUSETTS

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1944

COPYRIGHT, I 9 4 4 BY THE PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

DEDICATED

Acknowled gment Appreciative acknowledgment is hereby expressed for permission to use the following quotations: — To Mrs. Roark Bradford, on behalf of her husband who is in the armed forces, for "Ole Crip"; from his volume This Side of Jordan. To Charles Scribner's Sons for the excerpt from Margaret Ogilvie by Sir James M. Barrie. To Little, Brown and Company for the fable "The Potter" from Mrs. Laura Richards' volume, The Silver Crown. Many minor bits are likewise gratefully used, but they are beyond attributing with any definiteness. Let this appreciation be sufficient acknowledgment of indebtedness. P. E. O.

Contents Introductory: "Say I to Myself, Say I" I The Artistry of Self-Management

3 9

II Gearshifts

18

III "Pou Sto"

28

IV

Harpoon Anchor

38

The Temptation to Melodramatize

49

The Tear-Bottle Habit

54

Declarations of Independence

65

The Sentinel at the Portal

74

Cross Your Bridges before You Come to Them

85

V VI VII VIII IX

X Inside the Given XI

93

Balm and Honey and Spices

105

Be Sure You're Right. Then Go Ahead

112

XIII

Wayside Broods

119

XIV

Religion Is the Extension of Our Instinctive

XII

Naturalnesses

131

SAY I TO MYSELF

INTRODUCTORY

"Say I to Myself, Say I " V E R and over again we assume that there are

O

two selves to each of us. "I said to myself" is a

common preliminary phrase. I speak of my mind,

my life, my self. Whose is this mind, this life, this self? "Sez I to m'self, sez I " is the vernacular for this dualism. The realization of the selfhoods involved is the beginning of self-control — by the other self. The necessity of self-knowledge by this other (knowing) self and of selfmanagement by it is axiomatic — but far from always axiomatic in our daily practice. If we could only say to ourselves with the authority which "ourselves" would recognize and obey the regulative commands which in our over-selves we already know, we would straighten our lives out of most tangles, or certainly gain poise in the face of difficulty. What are the two selves? Which is the " I " and which the "myself"? " I " is the continuous, enthroned, appraising, evaluating, commanding self. It is more than what is customarily known as conscience, since for most of us "conscience"

4

SAY I TO MYSELF

is so largely permeated by convention that we get it confused with the supposed etiquette code of some celestial Emily Post or Mother Grundy. Only that self which is the thinking, autonomous, unique, judging, commanding one behind and beneath and above ready-made decisions is "I." Back in theological-school days our senior class solemnly elected the most painfully conscientious man K.O.D.C., Keeper of the Dean's Conscience. " I " is my K.O.C., transcendently Olympian, my moral intuition, my Sinaitic commandment-giver, my Socratic daemon, my still small voice, my basic, central, ineradicable, indelible, essential self of self. "Myself," however, is the busy, momentarily deciding, active self, out in the dusty world of practicalities. If character is the sum total of decisions we make for ourselves (and that is what character is) its evaluation is according to its obedience or disobedience to the admonitions of "I." "Myself" is free will. For "Myself" can hear the word of " I " and defiantly stick out its tongue and waywardly do the opposite. "Myself" can say to "I," "I know what you think I should do but I won't do it. So what?" Or by "Myself's" spontaneous choice it can accord itself with the urgent word " I " has uttered. " I " is no dictator; it has no automatic, bludgeoning compulsion over "Myself." There is no apron-string hold on "Myself" to keep "Myself" infantile and dependent. No matter how

"SAY I TO MYSELF, SAY I"

5

much the determinists or extreme behaviorists assert that all so-called decisions are only conditioned reactions, nevertheless we have inside information which is unquestionable that we are free to determine our decisions if we want to be. Of course we unthinkingly deliver ourselves over into the hands of circumstance when we are lazy or cowardly or otherwise below par and let ourselves be mere conditioned reactions without consulting the oracle of "I." We become the automata of emotionalism or wishful-thinking or rationalization or desire or primitive subconsciousness if we follow the down-hill path of least resistance, and our wills grow feebly anaemic or they even atrophy by disuse. But "Myself's" birthright is nevertheless the freedom of decision which is aware of "I." When "I" and "Myself" are wedded there is integration of personal life. When "I" and "Myself" are at odds there cannot be strength and poise and peace in it. There never comes a time when "Myself," even if callously defiant of "I," is not dimly aware that "I" is there. There is an uneasy guilt complex which roils the subconsciousness of the defiant, even when they are only vaguely aware of its clouded throne. "You see," the theologically-minded would remark, "God hath not left Himself without witness." There is a theory that reflex action affects much more than such instinctive acts as dodging when a missile comes at our face or pulling our fingers away from an unex-

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SAY I TO MYSELF

pectedly hot skillet. There is not time to think, we say. Inherited or cumulative experience is lodged in our spinal reflexes, so that the proper response need not take the long route through the brain but takes a short cut this side of it. Reflex action is also in our instinctive emotional responses. If we are merely reflex-action amateurs, when we are thwarted we grouch; when we are hurt we wail; when we are hungry we gorge; when we lust we rape; when we are struck we strike back, two teeth for one and two eyes for one. The reflex-action primitive has not given " I " its opportunity to advise. H e is a behaviorist robot. H e has not "stopped to think." If we are at all analytic we take these customary incidental phrases apart and find how accurately they express actualities. Just as we should dissect "Say I to myself" so we'd best dissect its cousin-phrases, "It occurred to me," "On second thought," and " I stopped to think." Each of these involves " I " and connotes the wisdom which comes

by

transcending

reflex-action

immediacies.

"I

stopped to think" says plainly that the decision has been referred to the advisor "I." " O n second thought" really isn't second thought at all: it is the first real thinking; for that which is reflex action is not thought-full. "It occurred to me" is true only when there has been listening. The space of time for this cocking of the inward ear to catch the quiet word " I " has to say may be lightning-brief. Unless in major issues there is no necessity, except for

"SAY I TO MYSELF, SAY I"

7

the beginner, for long cogitation. The logic of the hopeful advisor-self is not by slow travail, except in determinant crises which involve momentous consequences for all subsequent life. Then indeed careful thought is indicated and the penetration past all the screenings of " I " to its august and benignant presence, in clarity of revelation. "Thus saith the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity, whose name is Holy: I dwell in the high and holy place, with him also that is of a humble spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble." " I " says to "Myself" a stabilizing, uplifting, noble word of counsel, wisely to be followed in small or great decisions by those who "stop to think." Listen and the word will come! Others have quoted the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table apropos of the King's Jester. Who of us wouldn't like to have been one? For the King's Jester was no fool, despite his motley. That very motley proclaimed him a person as of another realm of life than the prosy, mundane life of usual men. His fool-hood was of the kind St. Paul meant when he said "I speak as a fool" with the foolishness that is of God. The Fool represented more than public opinion; he was a K.O.K.C. to the King; he could criticize and humble the king and be immune from punishment for lèse-majesté.

All this, provided he was witty, i.e. un-

morbid and no mere reflex-action-conditioned slave of surface existence. The Autocrat says, "It is not necessary to be a king to have a King's jester, it is only a case of 'sez

8

SAY I TO MYSELF

I to myself, sez I . ' " T o which this book is only a kind of Amen! The chapters which follow are each and all concerned with what " I " says to "Myself" and the results which come from "Myself's" listening and spontaneous conforming. The gist of them all is both religious (not dogmatic) and psychological (not technical), because if true religion is not creed but practice then psychology and religion are one and the same. Jesus called His religion "The Way" and said God is Life and Love and Truth. Then he who lives love and truth lives and moves and has his being in a God Who is his spirit, a life to be lived. The technique is simple, but it is an artistry. This artistry is only possible for those who know that practice is needful to attain any degree of expertness in self-management, however simple may be its axioms. Therefore let's stand ourselves up in the laboratory of our personal lives (the only laboratory to which we have the key of real admittance) and try ourselves out. Endeavoring to find out what " I " says to "Myself." For our personal good. And for all others with whom our lives interlock.

I The Artistry of Self-Management

M

O D E R N machinery is complex, yet a rightly made machine always coordinates. No matter how diverse and strangely shaped its component parts may be, they team-play with each other in the assembled, lubricated mechanism. Even a Model T Ford organically interplays. The up-to-date car or printing press or aeroplane or locomotive is nothing less than miraculous in its precision of efficient unity. The genius of the inventor, designer, and manufacturer is beyond words. Strange it is, therefore, that humans who can construct and integrate such marvels of cooperative power cannot seem to coordinate and unify the elements of personality! The inner self of the very man who designs the miracle-machine may be uncoordinated. Split personalities are not all psychopathic: many of us are not whole selves, but spiritually at odds. Our emotions, moods, desires, and hopes are "every which way."

If we should see two men in a rowboat, facing each other, each with a pair of oars, pulling in opposite directions, we would call them plain fools. Yet we may no

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SAY I TO MYSELF

more have learned the basic secret of having all our powers pull the same way. We are too sadly negating our own progress by opposite-pulling traits. It is a very uncivil war. We may be unconscious of the cancelling nullification of our ideals by contradictory, permitted, fractional motivations. We wonder why "The harder we try the less we seem to succeed." Our will-power is deadlocked by won't-power; our dreams are vitiated by some unsuspected, balky cowardice; our temptations onward are countered by temptations backward. "I would not waits upon I will." If we only would command the wrongly facing motivation to turn around and behave itself, pulling with that long pull and strong pull and pull all together which makes unanimity potent, we would be astonished at the results. Don't we know someone somewhere who has a mysterious personal power in him, yet whose equipment of brain, brawn, and bravery seems on analysis to be far from unusual? He says nothing flashingly brilliant, but we remember what he said and acknowledge its truth long after we have forgotten the pyrotechnic epigrams of a genius. He does nothing conspicuously dashing or dominating, but his modest simplicity vibrates with a higher voltage of effectiveness than the high-pressure salesmanship of himself the go-getter breezily asserts. Our slightest touch of this quiet person is contagious for good to our whole nature.

THE ARTISTRY OF SELF-MANAGEMENT

u

What is the explanation of such personal radiation? The correspondence course in six lessons will not discover it. Neither, some psychologists to the contrary, is it merely quantitative social aptitude. Rather does it seem to be the stepped-up total which comes of coordinated inner life. Whether it is the electrical effect of the charming scapegrace or the delightful rascal or the unconscious saint, the explanation is that the sum of unified individuality is more than the addition-total of its parts. I have a friend who whimsically expresses this by saying, "They say that two and two always makes four. I tell you they do not: put them together another way and they make twenty-two." The sum total of the symphony is harmony, not cumulative noises. Browning says that the great poet can put together four words and make not another word but a star. The philosophical doctrine of Holism (Wholism) is along this line. From synthesis something new and fine emerges as an overplus. My body is made of cells, each one according to its individual specialty of function. Each cell has its cycle of life, its particular uniqueness of duty and characteristics. All these myriad cells are organically related to each other in an amazing team-play. They demonstrate the motto (usually otherwise utilized) "One for all and all for one. From each according to his ability: to each according to his need." In organ-groupings and then in bodily mutuality they make up the living physical organism. But notice

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SAY I TO MYSELF

that when I write this sentence I do not say "We, the lives of the cells of this physical organism in a body assembled, announce the following as our unanimous conclusion." I say "I," which means that into the physical organism there has come something new we call a mind and beyond that something we call personality or a soul. The coordinated unity of the physical not only brings the four of the bodily but the twenty-two of individuality — an emergent reality. Exactly as the organic physical somehow enables or catches or nests a mind which is of a new and nobler realm of values, so the character which pulls its traits together is the medium of a new and nobler beauty and worth which we call Personality. (It deserves the capital initial.) This book is mainly an endeavor to aid personal coordination and thus to help its readers catch something of the "twenty-two" kind of life. The artistry of self-management is at least very simple in principle, even if it may not be in practice. No morbid ghoulishness of amateur psychoanalysis for us, which. ruefully ratifies the assertion that man is only a compound of the beast, the savage and the child! The animal, primitive, and child inheritances are in all of us; but isn't the emergent Person more than they add up to? Most of us are not pathologically abnormal, but just blundering, honest, earnest, struggling humans (Oh, so human!) who do not yet need to be

THE ARTISTRY OF SELF-MANAGEMENT 13 detailedly versed in Freud and Wundt and Behaviorism and Gestalt psychology. Even if some of these pundits are analytically right on the subconscious but not on the super conscious level and if their findings seem necessary for the consulting diagnostician to know by rote, you and I, plain humans attempting self-realization preferably by the help of a wholesome and simple faith, do not need their microscopic technical wisdom and technical terminology, so largely specializing in the characteristics of sick minds or their subliminal currents. It is safer for most of us first to learn and practice a few rudimentary psychological axioms than it is to descend into the subcellar of personality and grope our way in the dark without even the candle of humor to scare away the gibbering bogies we might think we glimpsed. To change the simile, remember the centipede who, when asked which foot comes after which, could not tell and lay bewildered in the ditch. It is too easy for the average man to get "paralysis by analysis." No, by inside information we know we are not mere conditioned reactions. By dead, or rather live, reckoning we can feel enough within us of will and soul to work on the assumption that they are real. Sophomorons have sometimes shown that little knowledge of debunking psychology which proves its danger by their premature announcements that there is no reality to conscience and that self-expression means complete freedom from the inhibitions of Victorianism, so

i4

SAY I TO MYSELF

that mood or desire ("which are only responses to stimuli, anyway, and without moral significance") shall be allowed its untrammeled way. Materialistic or morbid psychologies, like psychical research, are dynamite in the hands of the smattering layman. Basic religion still has enough guiding truths for one to get along fairly well! For most of us Jesus of Nazareth's intuitive understanding of human nature is psychology enough. Even the wisest savants, or at least those who have kept their idealism and their faith in spiritual realities, only ratify His philosophy and method. W e shall therefore take it for granted here that the terms "conscience," the "soul," the "will," the "spiritual," and their synonyms do not denote exploded unrealities, but that by our own self-knowledge we can roughly identify their existence, their function and their influence. If this marks out this unpretentious book as oldfashioned and pious, we who hold to character-values as worth working at will have to endure the opprobrium of seeming unsophisticated. But we are seeking personal solvency, its associate health and wholesomeness, in order to be selves worth contributing. For character is not an end in itself. Personal religion is a popular term, but personal religion cannot safely remain too personal. Its very essence evaporates if it becomes self-centered, a sanctified hypochondria, hand on pulse forever. By and by we should arrive at such happiness in our world that we should think no more con-

THE ARTISTRY OF SELF-MANAGEMENT 15 centratedly on our spiritual health than a healthily busy man, interested in what he is doing, remembers all the time how good his digestion is. There are great moments in every life when we act with our whole being. Moments of ecstasy in love, in listening to the Symphony playing Beethoven's Fifth, in a good game of tennis, in reading an enthralling great book the majesty of which sweeps through every fibre of us, moments when the actor completely loses himself in his part, when the painter is possessed by the significance of that which commands him to paint his best, when the sympathetic friend does his utmost to help in time of trouble, when a sudden emergency pulls out of us a true heroism without our knowing we are heroic — such times show us what the feeling is when we live "wholeheartedly." When I was a lad my father, as good fathers do, took me to the circus. (Would that there were fewer who send their boy to church but ta\e them to the circus!) I can remember most vividly the "man on the flying trapeze," swinging in a great arc high up in the roof of the tent. When the momentum was enough, he let go his trapeze and swooped across space like a seagull to catch the opposite trapeze which had been swung toward him just in time, thirty feet away. He had to let go before he caught hold. Then a clown clambered up to the released trapeze and swung, kicking and squealing in des-

16

SAY I TO MYSELF

perate attempt to be comic, trying to get hold of the second trapeze before he let go of the first one. He was not even funny. No one laughed. The clown was so evidently at odds with himself that the entirety of the athlete's diving self-commitment seemed blasphemed by the contrast. Life has thrill exactly in proportion to its wholehearted self-forgetfulness. First the wholeheartedness. Then the losing of that unified self to find oneself. No, character is not an end in itself. It is gathered into unity only to be forth-given, magnetized out of selfthought by enthusiastic "otherliness." Character is like the mill-pond which gathers the flowing waters of the stream into its reservoir, but which grows slimy and foul unless the sluiceway is opened. The millpond exists for the mill-wheel. Character is like coal, which is epitomized sunshine, which does not exist to stay stored in the depths of geologic strata but comes into its own when burned to render back heat and energy. Ashes are not its real consummation but the gift of flame from the coal to its usefulness. Character is like the seed which is nurtured on its parent plant, to be carried on its parachute of down across the face of the fields until it settles down in some crevice of the earth, there to be beaten into the soil by a raindrop or trodden in by the foot of some passing sheep. Next spring there is a new plant where that seed fell; but that plant was not in the seed; it is made of dirt — made of

THE ARTISTRY OF SELF-MANAGEMENT 17 the earth which has been enabled to express itself in beauty by the creative self-losing of the seed. Character is like bread which has not fulfilled its destiny as long as it remains on a plate, even if it is the silver paten of the sacrament. It only consummates its reason for being when it has ceased to be bread, because, eaten and assimilated, it is now new strength to the eater. But character must first of all cohere with itself, not remain a dissociate or granular variousness; just as one cannot throw a basket of feathers into the teeth of the wind and expect them to be caught as a ball is caught. In its every unified activity it affirms: — N o w I will test the temper of that sword Which I have spent my life to weld and whet. And with a cry I leap.

Completeness of self-commitment is possible only for those who first of all have themselves in hand. Therefore the preliminary exhortation must be, "Pull yourself together."

II Gearshifts *

F

E W of us are mere literalists. Nevertheless we find a whimsical aptness now and again in some literalist

interpretations. For instance, there are those who

maintain that the old prophet Nahum prophesied automobiles, when he said, " T h e chariots shall rage in the streets, they shall jostle one another in the broad ways: they shall seem like torches: they shall run like the lightnings." One must admit an accidental aptness in his

phrases. There is a very modern parable in the simile of our automobiles, the basic trademark of our civilization. What ingenuity, artistry and genius even the humblest car embodies! T h e exhilaration of the skimming car! T h e sheer bliss of smooth motion! Many of us are old enough to remember the plodding days our children cannot vision, before this miracle of mechanics became so axiomatic. W e therefore have reverent awe and ever fresh appreciation of it. * The late Dr. John Hopkins Denison's book The Enlargement of Personality (Scribners, 1930) mentions "Emotional Gearshifts," but this chapter repeats none of its ideas. Yet acknowledgment should be made of the suggestion in the phrase.

GEARSHIFTS

19

The efficiency and artistry of our generation is mechanical rather than social. Individualistically we still suffer from maladjustments and non-coordination by the ideal. We are not as expert in getting on together even under the family roof as is the mechanician in the garage in bringing an old motor car to fitness for the road by adjustments of the sundry components under the hood. If we even conspired to produce the coordination of good will and oiled our relationships with charity what might we not gain? But this is only a preliminary parenthesis of our analogy. May we follow the analogy to the detail of our personal Gearshifts? We want our lives to run smoothly and joyously: how do we get them going so?

Emotional Fuel The motive fuel of life is emotion. Everyone of us has ample vital supply. We are endowed with tremendous reserves of emotion, born in us and renewed by the race. Fear, anger, passion, hope, the desire for happiness — is there anyone who has not enough emotion? Even the most unacknowledging "imperson" is moved by it more than he will admit. We need not be ashamed of it: it makes humans human. The thing we need to beware, though, is raw, crude emotion, untransformed and undisciplined. Emotion needs and deserves the spark of the will to sublimate and ennoble it. Drop by drop it should

20

SAY I TO MYSELF

be fed to the spark of the continuing will-for-fine-living. Raw or crude or in bulk it can wreck life by its explosive might. Raw fear, raw rage, raw lust, raw yearning, raw ideas of happiness tear life to flinders and devastate relationships. Do we need to be told the harm done by our nightmare terrors, our berserk red rages, our steamy animalities, our glutting self-indulgences? Their results speak the duty of disciplined sublimation. On the brute or infantile level of life raw emotion was natural, but we are supposed to have reached the ability of self-management on a high plane. We are called upon to sublimate our emotions and use them temperately, drop by drop. The man with raw emotion is simply not civilized, let alone Christian! We inherit fears aplenty. Our ancestors needed fear; children, too, need intuitive fears, to protect them from dangers. The caveman needed fear to survive sabre-toothed tigers and the dark of the primitive jungle. We do not need fears as he did. We have inherited more than our physically protected day normally demands. Unless we transfigure our extra stock of fears into prudence, into foresight and thus into preventive wisdom, fear will turn to morbidity and phobia. Sublimated it becomes a constructive power for carefulness. Anger is surely explosive. Raw, it blasts life wide open and peace out of existence. The undisciplined tempers some of us allow ourselves, whether they are childish

GEARSHIFTS

21

tantrums or surly sulkiness, are crude beyond words. Rage can be transformed into honest indignation, militant championships for a cause, heroic self-riskings. Above all things it must not be wasted; no personality can grow on insipid indifference. We need to care intensely. This emotion, refined and civilized, is the very stuff of true living. Tempered temper gives us force. Passion deserves its own higher powers. Gone, thank God, are the days when ascetic morbidity branded it as essentially obscene. We know that love is potent, but we know too that when not abused it is wholesome, natural and to be encouraged. It climbs the ladder of its own evolution out of the blind instinctiveness of the animal into Christian matehoods, friendships, and social unities. It adds the mental and the spiritual until the physical is sacramentalized. Love is of God and deserves its divinization. And joy is, of course, likewise to be sublimated. It cannot remain on Caliban's level and do us any good. There must be something more than pleasure to it. It must rise to joy in the truth, joy in ideals, joy in moral victory. It will not be a mere painlessness. It will learn to thrust straight through pain into peace, through tragedy into triumph. It will taste a Gethsemane cup and rise stalwart. Emotion is the motive power of life, but, drop by drop, it needs the spark of the will for its sublimation.

22

SAY I T O M Y S E L F Reverse or Forward?

When a beginner climbs into an automobile for his first driving lesson he needs to be told not to shift the clutch into the wrong position. H o w needful it is to know which is reverse and which is forward. If one wants to go forward it is pathetic to go into reverse and then press hard on the gas. Yet how many amateurs lose their heads and almost hysterically push the harder. In trying to get going do we lose our heads and try too hard the wrong way? "The harder I try, the worse I seem to get" wails the discouraged victim of a "pet sin." What Phillips Brooks called "That mysterious reversal of the moral machinery" works to his harm. The will-power has insufficient won't-power. The release from negative imagination is positive imagination. To find a consecration is liberty from morbidity. When I love something or someone with such completeness that my imagination plays constantly upon its beauties and worth it lifts me out of reverse fascinations. The law of the spirit of life sets us free from the law of the spirit of death. When our faculties are once occupied by nobilities there is no room for ignobilities. Disgust is the only proper reverse. Disgust at the evilness of evil follows after consuming enthralment by the good and lovely. It is the inevitable reaction of an enthusiasm for that with which the baser desire is incompatible.

GEARSHIFTS Low

23

Gear

Moral progress starts with resolution. Resolution is low gear. It has tremendous power but it goes grindingly and slowly. There is heroism in the low-gear life. Every inch of progress comes by a victory of grim grit. Every separate step is a new overcoming. There is no momentum for running start. The initial launching of self is by a new focus of the will for every act. Like the solemn baby learning to button its clothes with fumbling, earnest fingers and puckered brow the simplest decision takes all there is of a man. Someone coined the aphorism that Christianity does not require an extraordinary man but it requires all there is of any man. We know many a low-gear man or woman. Perhaps we ourselves are low-gear. For our comfort I repeat that low-gear lives are heroic. They are really getting going. In them the majesty of the will and emotion are hearteningly plain. But such lives go painfully slow and without exhilaration. Who wants low-gear to go on forever ? Honor the low-gear life but hope its acceleration will presently carry it beyond low-gear. The only thing to mention further about sheer resolution is that it is resolve for something fine and only incidentally against its opposite. It is upward endeavor for love of the enthusing best, not clamp-jawed resistance

24

SAY I TO

MYSELF

against the evil which still possesses our desires. Low-gear lives are all in one direction. Coordinated efficiency has begun. Second Gear By repeated resolutions we form habits. Second gear is therefore habit. The physical process of habit is well known. Repeated resolutions set up an automatic process which is taken over by the spinal cord and mid-brain, leaving the thinking centers free for new and higher activity. The habitual train of familiar activity goes on but our best powers are at liberty for further adventure. Stabilized custom leaves the real self now free. We were not intended to be automata, you see. Fixed behavior-patterns are not enough. As the well-known epigram says, "There is plenty of room at the top — of the spinal column." Even good habits, exemplary though they may be, are not enough. The ants in an ant-hill or the bees of a hive are models of behavior; their pattern of cooperation is fixed and habitual by instinct. But beyond their habit there are no higher faculties at adventurous activity. There is no fun in the mere arrangements of life: it is its qualities of experience that count. Aren't we sorry when we see people gradually fade to routine ? N o matter how blameless or useful the behaviorpattern, routine is supposed to be only the solid habit-basis

GEARSHIFTS

25

beneath a more elastic, thrill-full, joyous life of the soul. The unemployment problem of the highest faculties is tragic. How much care we must take to utilize the opportunities habit provides! H o w ignominious it is to grub along on the automatic level! Yet how horribly many are little more than cogs in the gigantic machine of material affairs. For how tragically many is living little more than a treadmill trudge. Familiar things grow too automatic. Every time a wedding couple stands up before the altar for the vows of lifelong faithfulness and mutual cherishing someone will whisper to himself, "And soon they will settle down!" Settle down? Down? Down to routine? T o unemotional, faded usualness ? Down to taking each other for granted ? Whenever a prospective bride and groom sit in my office to talk things over, my impulse is to urge them, "O never take each other for granted! Fall in love all over again daily! Keep your mutual courtship and thoughtfulness! Intimacy demands more, not less, courtesy. Respect each other's personality and play up to it. Explore and discover new characteristics and charm. In proportion as you make your dual adjustment a steady, reliable habit, utilize your freed souls for additional riches of joy." So of any other relationship or personal technique, good habit is good, but not best.

26

SAY I TO MYSELF High Gear

The final blessedness life can know is exhilaration. High gear's smooth serenity is exhilaration. As if one were flying. As the prophet Ezekiel in his strange vision saw the whirling wheels within wheels "but the spirit of God was not within the wheels," so you and I want to know whether the spirit of God can be found in the wheels of our existence. We were made for noble joy. Without it we are eternally unsatisfied. Life is meant for high-gear traveling: all else is preliminary thereto. Exhilaration is nothing less than experience of God. The feel of God is unmistakable. It is of this Jesus speaks when He says, "My peace I give unto you; not as the world giveth give I unto you." By peace He means strong, tranquil, invulnerable, joyous exhilaration. Only His secret gives this, no matter what happens. He said His sentences of radiant, triumphant peace even amidst the gathering shadows of the Passion, facing danger, misunderstanding and death with level eyes, firm quiet and inner serenity. He had the constant thrill of life in God. If we are hopeful for exhilaration it is well for us to remember that it only comes after resolution has merged into habit and habit has taken over basic activity to leave the supremest faculties free, that "the utmost shall be for the highest." W e can no more start with exhilaration than a car can be started uphill in high gear. Zest is not first

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but last. The momentum of personality is a gradual crescendo. Exhilaration! We were made for it! Exhilaration! It is victorious soulhood. But just as a famous coat-of-arms has as its motto the single Latin word "Gradatim," so character does not reach its fullest joy at the outset. Spiritual gearshifts must come in their due order up to peace-in-power. First resolution, then habit, and last of all buoyant Life!

Ill "Pou Sto"

T

H E ancient Greek physicist, Archimedes, is reputed to have boasted, "Give me a place to stand and a lever long enough and I can move the earth." The Greek words for "a place to stand" are "pou sto." Where is our pou sto for leverage on ourselves? It is quite plain that there must be some stance for this leverage. "Know thyself" implies a knower with a pou sto. If God is supposed to be both transcendent and immanent, that is, beyond and within life, so am I to my life both beyond and within. The "Beyond that is Within" is a commonplace of daily experience. There can be no sufficient definition of this unconditioned, indwelling personal selfhood short of the divine in us. All else is entangled in the processes of existence, enmeshed in circumstance and mood. As God is to His universe, so, in little, am I to my life in body, mind and spirit.

The subtle but real tragedy of too many folk is their spider-web entanglement in temporary, physical, and emotional accident. They do not realize they are victims of existence. The potential divine in them has been en-

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meshed by the minute strands of daily cares and concerns until existence sucks its life blood. Even Gulliver, a giant in Lilliput, could be tied fast by multitudinous gossamer threads. Which is a parable. When I was a lad I had a favorite nightmare. Studying a bit worriedly (to make up for arrearages in time for a looming examination), at midnight, in bed at last, I would find myself on a two-acre textbook suspended in illimitable space by invisible supports. The pages were so tremendous I had to pace the lines, reading by the light of a baleful moon, while bitter Boreas blew viciously about me, there in my night clothes, chilling my marrow. Racing back to the beginning of each new line and stumbling crab-fashion along its incomprehensible words, in the middle of a necessary sentence I would come at last to the lower right-hand corner of the second page. Yet to turn the page I must get off the book. I would peer over its edge. Below me, as above, was star-strewn infinity. There was no pou sto for me; no stance off the book! Yet the page must be turned! Small wonder that I had to be shaken awake by a sleepy father and given a drink of water to calm my nerves, that I might come back for a sufficient moment to reality and know I could be master of the book, not its slave. This nightmare is likewise parabolic: for oftentimes we find ourselves trapped just thus on the pages of the book of existence. Fantastic, whimsical, tortured Cyrano once extemporized

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a long poetic chant which told six ways to get off the earth. He felt the urge to independence of its arrant compulsions; he knew too well the tightening of its manacles; its mischances, injustices and maladjustments. But if he could he was going to keep the unfettered blitheness of a spirited spirit. He must have ways to keep his feet free of the snares which might lay him low, ways to keep his mood buoyant, ways to get off the earth! Heroic Cyrano de Bergerac! Read him afresh in Rostand's play and find his secret of disentangled spirit! The ability to get outside oneself onto some firm pou sto for leverage on oneself is probably the most necessary of all preliminaries to self-mastery. " T o see oursels as ithers see us" is an art in itself. It is deliverance both from unearned complacency and from morbidity. Which is the knotted entanglement from which you or I need a Gordian sword? In either case, that of unearned complacency or that of morbidity, a single principle is at issue. N o man can live happily without self-respect. We all seek it by fair means or foul. Sometimes by the fictions of self-deceit, sometimes by projection, i.e. blaming others for our failures or imputing our faults to others. Or, alternatively, by the more honest but more harrowing worry an ingrowing conscience magnifies into all-black accusations, with the accompanying feeling that the agony of realized ignominy and failure is a hair-shirt virtue in itself. It may be well

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to pause a bit for further thought on these two respective vicious circles of enclosed bondage to mistakenness: to see how we lose our pou sto. The process of self-deceit probably begins with sheer laziness. It is so much bother to take self in hand and crack the whip. Goodness is always more laborious than evil. Evil always follows the path of least resistance. It is easier to be stingy than generous; it is more trouble to be helpful than it is to sit still in the center of one's spiderweb of selfishness; it takes less thought to be surly or silent than gracious; rudeness takes less ingenuity than tact; cowardice is simpler than courage; temper is more instinctive than humorous patience; sensitiveness is a sitdown strike against the onerous demands of humor. One may always know right from wrong by the amount of resolve and emotional initiative involved. Even if our moral lethargy paradoxically involves much labor to accomplish its ends, remember the popular proverb that "lazy folk take the most pains." For the hardest labor of all, and at any cost to be avoided by the lazy, is the labor of character-betterment. The next stage after lethargy of the moral will is the growth of criticism of other people. It is easier to pull the nobler neighbor down to our level than it is to climb to his. To find flaws in others seems to excuse our own flawfulness; we are "as good as the average." We grow ghoulishly gleeful over the unpleasant all about us; we

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become connoisseurs of Everyman's faults — not of our own. Self-justification has externalized our own lurking awareness of failure. N o wonder the psychologists call this common quirk projection. So much so that it becomes an easily recognized symptom of something awry within the critic. Whenever we find a man sardonically cynical of his fellows, a woman who has grown into a human carpet-sweeper sucking up all the minute dirt on the floor of her world, or a person who satisfies himself with explosive anger at the unfair conspiracies and injustices of which he expertly discerns himself to be the martyred victim — whenever we find someone with this habit of mind or mood it is evidence of a buried sense of spiritual inadequacy; deep, deep down and probably unrecognized, but doggedly persistent. The sudden question may well intrude itself into the mind of the habitually blameless, "Could this be I ? " As runs the quatrain: — Behold the happy moron, He's such a blissful man! He doesn't know he is one. Oh, dear, perhaps I am!

Critical ability thus sharpened and turned outward, the obedient mind proceeds to rationalize. Excuses grow plausible. We marshal justifying extenuations and interpretations for our own benefit; we absolve ourselves with pitying facility. Oh, no!, we are never really wrong! We do not even feel defensive, for our vindications have well

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availed. We have failed to keep the distinction between excuses and reasons. For excuses never really excuse, and an excuse is any alibi into which an element of our own choice or attitude has entered. Reasons are self-evident circumstances beyond control, but excuses involve our reaction to those circumstances. Whose epitaph is it (there is a dispute 'twixt several old-time worthies) which reads, I beseeche ye, brethren, By the mercies of God, Remember ye may be mistaken.

Such an exhortation is pertinent for the person who rationalizes successfully. The eighth commandment may well connote, "Thou shalt not steal — self-respect." We need a standard which is not nibbled away by the little foxes of palliation. We do not want relativity of morals but an absolute criterion of self-judgment. T o keep conscience healthily ruthless is not to make it an enemy, but a friend. W e cannot come to clear-eyed knowledge of our errors except by standing off from ourselves on some firm pou sto. But the other extreme from bland projection and selfabsolving favoritism is not morbidity. The pendulum must not swing to that. Morbidity is just as much a self-deceit as opiate self-excusing. We are never as bad as morbidity paints us. The pessimist about himself needs a door open out of that windowless cell in which he wears the vicious circle of accusations deeper and deeper as he toils round

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and round the path of faults and failures with never a tangent out and away. Introspective bitterness can grow to be a perverse kind of pleasure, like biting down on an aching tooth. Such flagellation and rack may almost be enjoyed with sadistic satisfaction. If only the emotionally malarial people were not the ones who took grimly the confession, "We have left undone those things which we ought to have done and we have done those things which we ought not to have done; and there is no health in us"! The General Confession at least provides them with the tempering of their self-shredding despondency by hinting that the erring and straying is like that of muddle-headed lost sheep, rather than of the crafty viciousness of wolves! But probably they have not noted that. What minister has not been consulted by frightened alarmists, shudderingly sure they have committed the unforgivable sin, although they are not sure what that sin is! (The sin against the Holy Spirit which the Master calls impossible to reach with forgiveness is the sin of the shut heart which imperviously defies even its own promptings, and this is unforgivable only in the sense that it cannot be reached even by God as long as its hermetically sealed insulation continues. It certainly is not the sin any terrified would-be-good can commit.) Facilis decensus Averni. Panic at gibbering demons of despair stampedes all faith in God or self. Health of soul comes by no such hypochondria.

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It should be one of the cardinal principles chalked up on the wall of our inmost sanctuary that we have no right to criticize anyone until first we have believed in them — including ourselves. Only when we know what of infinite value is being harmed by the error or sin have we the right to work in its interest. Of course, we have faults. We have some sins, too. It is no Pollyanna sentimentality, however, to assert that noone is as bad as in his morbid moments he thinks he is. W e all have some virtues to balance. They may not be full-grown or dazzling but they do exist and deserve to be taken into account. It is not necessarily egotism to "reckon ourselves up," as St. Paul says, and take our merits into some consideration alongside our blacker characteristics. Perhaps it is our Puritan or ascetic inheritance that makes us too instinctively feel that unless we grovel in self-abasement and flail ourselves into self-despising we are not properly humble and therefore morally proper at all. True humility will most surely come to those who see their possibilities and measure the distance they have to go to their fulfilment. We need objectivity. We need impersonality about ourselves. If we are starting out on soul-surgery it will be well for us to recollect that by the ethics of his profession no surgeon is recommended to take the scalpel when someone dear to him is the patient. He cannot be sufficiently cool when one dearer to him than his own life is to lie

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beneath his knife. The same principle holds in selfsurgery. Even the diagnosis ought not to be done until a goodly degree of emotional coolness has been gained; let alone the actual plunging of the sharp will-to-reform. Healthy nerves are requisite, a sense of humor along with the serious resolve, and, above all, a sound, humble faith in one's own essential self-hood. How can this be had except by getting off onto a pou sto for sane objectivity? Either persuasive rationalizing or hobgoblin morbidity is probably self-deceit, you see. The only firm pou

sto

from which we can know ourselves is somewhere whence the God-view of ourselves can be glimpsed and the lever of His faith in us applied. That God-view is not onesided. Not so long ago it was an ecclesiastical fad to hang a chart in Sunday School rooms with a gigantic eye depicted thereon, from which rays went shooting forth in all directions, with the text above, "Thou God seest me." Did the child who gazed on this chart conceive the idea of an omniscient, omnipresent Detective God, lurking in ambush to catch the unwary culprit red-handed and pounce on him with vindictive glee ? The God-view of us is not this. Nor is it its opposite, the lush benignance of an indulgent sentimentalist, whose qualities are not so much of Fatherhood as of sugary Papa-hood. The best God-view of man can still be found in the New Testament where the ruthless love of the Master for the hu-

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mans with whom He dealt is grounded on such faith in their possibilities that any contrary trait unbearably crucifies their discovered divineness. Jesus of Nazareth provides us with the best kind of a pou sto.

IV Harpoon-Anchor

I

M A G I N A T I O N is a miraculous power. No one has ever adequately explained it. It has not had its due of attention and appreciation. It is native to every child and can be cultivated as we grow, to be a determinative influence upon lifework. It is (to use a technical word) proleptic. To be proleptic means that I stand where I am and reach out to lay hold on what may be, which I find to be real, not merely a vaporing of the mind, and then pull myself out of what is into what can be by my hold on its firm ideal.

In the days before the fishermen of Grand Manan had motors in their modest boats they were fearfully bothered by the occasional flat calms of the mouth of Fundy. It was no joke to be caught in its currents with no wind for their sails. A local genius therefore invented what he called a harpoon anchor. He took a heavy harpoon and hinged anchor-flukes to its spear-head, which folded back along the shaft but spread when he pulled back. T o the harpoon haft he fastened a long coil of thin, strong rope. Then when the wind dropped and the long swells grew

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glassy the strongest athlete of the little crew would take the harpoon-anchor up to the prow of the boat and heave it as far forward as he could. A sudden yank would spread the flukes. If it caught on the bottom the men took hold and pulled up. Over and over again he and they would repeat the arduous process of throw-and-pull, throw-andpull, throw-and-pull. It was slow work but eventually it would get them home. Imagination works precisely so, except that its thrown arc forward is far beyond mere shoulder-muscles' force. For imagination is a kind of harpoon-anchor and the tied rope is emotion. Unfortunately the pull-up by its forward hold is not always quite so sure as it might be on our part. Imagination was meant to be the means for us resolutely to pull up out of the actual to the ideal. But the man whose boat is "practicality" sometimes finds it too heavy for the slender rope that ties him to the proleptic anchor; the rope snaps and he drifts. Or else at his too-rough haul the anchor lets go its tentative hold and he pulls it back to him instead of pulling himself to it; then to excuse himself he calls himself a "realist." Or yet again the anchor sticks fast, wedged between unfortunate rocks of fear and the terrified man hasn't decision enough to cut the rope and try afresh with a reserve harpoon; and the tide comes in and whirlpools swirl around him, anchored fast. To drop the simile and "talk straight" (for as Mrs.

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Malaprop warned us by her slip of the tongue, nothing can be "as obstinate as an allegory on the banks of the River Nile"), imagination plus emotion plus resolution was intended to be the combination of human powers by which progress should normally come. The combination usually works so well that we do not recognize its successive steps. In small ways, at least, we function smoothly. Yet the dangers are constant of "hard-boiled," unimaginative heaviness, of cutting imagination loose to become mere daydreaming unreality, or of that negative expertness and foliation of imagination which is worry. Imagination and emotion need the discipline of the healthy will to keep them proper motivations. There are alternate dangers to imagination and emotion. They may be deadened by this brass-tacks world of ours to prosaic dullness. Or they may run amok and wreck our peace. In either case, may Heaven (which is the sum total of all spirit) be our aid! These dangers need a bit more analysis, for warning. First, the danger of unimaginative hardness. If there is one prevalent, persuasive, subtly poisonous modern heresy today, it is that it is "smart to be tough." The complete "modern" prides himself on disillusion. He has "debunked" Victorianism. His world is wet with the spatter of burst bubbles of romance. He counts himself upto-date in proportion as he is brutally sophisticated. H e stands on a soapbox, thumps his chest and proudly pro-

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claims that he wears no rose-colored spectacles but sees grim reality as it is. If his books which mount to best-seller list are a barometer of predominant philosophy there's cause to worry. Their pictures of life are amply devoid of "sugary sentimentalism," their heroes are abnormal, their heroines are psychopathic, their relations detailedly sordid, their wisdom futility. With muck for muck's sake we are Ballyhooed down Hogarthian Main Streets, muddy with slime and murky with fog from the bogs. And all in the name of "realism." Lest this description be thought the private peeve of a pious unrealist, here is a ratifying quotation from a book column by Dr. William Lyon Phelps, "If a man living on another planet received the new novels and plays published on the earth in English and if all he knew or could surmise of human life were confined to such reading, he would probably believe that our world was the equivalent of hell. He would not believe there were many happy or joyous lives, or innocent delight and merrymaking. . . . Furthermore, if from the same sources of information he attempted to appraise our standards of morality, he would not believe there were any persons who combined intelligence with respectability." As for painting, Surrealism and other faddist schools of revolutionary brutality seem to seek to demonstrate that to be defiant and shocking is to be smart, that art

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and beauty have nothing in common and that recognizable depiction is absurd. The ultra-modern stands before the pet Picassolet (which as Mark Twain once said of some predecessor, looks like a cat having a fit in a platter of tomatoes) and chants his standard cliches of "non-objective symbolism" and "the simple, direct vision of a child"; forgetting that an adult may either be childlike or childish — or maudlin. The minor Freudians, obsessed by "libido"; the Behaviourists, reducing our human best to mechanistic response to stimuli; and the sardonic analysts who claim man is only a compound of the beast, the savage and the child, combine to preach that self-expression is by release of our lower nature from discipline and restraint. Small wonder the younger generation, copying the flamboyant arrogance of the conspicuous few and next elder pagans, is misled into the notion that a kind of reverse Pharisaism is the properly improper thing. Through all this crass din of what has been called the Higher Hooliganism the careful listener can hear the words of Nietsche, battling against his inferiority complex, "Have naught to do with slave-morality! Be not hampered by scruples! A new commandment give I unto you; be hard!" There is no blasphemy more iniquitous than that the pessimistic, the deformed, the nauseous, are truer than the purities, the heroisms, high faiths, sacrifices, and ideals

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which have been evolved through all the aeons since the cave-man's day. The bored scorn for sentiment, refinement and spirituality by the bitter-pill-enthusiasts proves only something of themselves. Are glories "too good to be true"? Too good to be true? There is real misemphasis for you! God forgive us the disloyalty to H i m and to Life by any feeling that evil is more significant than good. God and the divine are so much more real than pain and sin and sorrow that they are not to be mentioned in the same breath as on the same level of reality. That in which God is is obviously much more real than that in which God is not. Love is so much more real than ill-will that it can almost be said that in love's presence there is no such ultimate reality as hate. Of course, we are not ready to say that there is no such thing at all as evil or pain or grief, for there is too much hideous reality to them blindly to deny them. Yet they are not as real as goodness and charity and beauty and peace, for God is not in those adversary forces. Therefore with our hearts we acknowledge ultimate reality to those things in which we can believe. We can believe there is wrong, but we cannot believe in that wrong. We both believe about and in virtue. The loveliness and power of the divine life are so much truer than the nasty and the porcine and the thuggish that they shine clearly on high like a snow-capped mountain at sunrise above the miasma of the dismal swamps. It is not idiotic to believe

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in belief; it is not childish to love love; it is not insipid to keep pure; it is not absurd to have faith in faithfulness. But oh, what a wrench of courageous sanity it takes to disentangle ourselves from the hypnotic spell of perverse misvaluation and sufficiently to affirm to ourselves that ideals are valid! T h e explanation of the baleful persuasion of the brutal is that it is hard to hold ourselves up to the ideals which mark progress. In the march of evolution ideals are in the vanguard or scouting on adventurously far ahead, and the weaker or lazier folk find the pace too demanding. They lag behind or even turn back and return toward the terminus a quo. They revert to type. T h e strain of advancing progress is too strenuous for their lethargic natures and they relax to easier slackness. H o w much drinking, profanity, bad temper, whining, vainglory and selfishness is thus to be explained! T o revert to the simile of the harpoon-anchor, what a confession of cowardice it is not to attempt its throwing; and what foolishness it is, if the harpoon-anchor has once been thrown (by civilization or the individual) to haul it back to the boat and not try again! Imagination plus emotion plus resolution will bring the normal life to the haven where it would be — harpoon-anchor and rope and muscle of the self. N o w turn to the alternative danger, which, after all, is probably the more likely one among the readers of such a book as this — the danger of negative emotionalism.

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In the pictorial analogy, the danger is that of the anchor wedged fast in submarine rocks and holding the boat in the eddies of the tide-rip, going in dizzy circles, getting nowhere. Perhaps one of our personal extra commandments should be "Thou shalt not emotionalize in vain." The vividness of negative imagination and emotion which can be developed is a testimony to imagination — but to imagination misused. How we work at our worries! The detailed embroidery of our fears shows the hard work on them. W e are painfully familiar with every lineament of our bogies; our hobgoblins are familiar intimates. W e know them in the dark before they speak. The expertness of assiduous worriers would be comic if it were not so disastrous to the peace of all concerned. The folklore tale of the weeping maid in the cellar, which we read as children out of Grimm's Tales, shows how deep in the folk-mind is the knowledge of this. At the great feast in the castle hall the ale needed replenishing: a serving-wench was sent to the cellar to draw a pitcherful from the great cask. She was gone inexplicably long; other servants were sent to see what harm must have come to her. They found her sitting by the ale-cask with the spigot turned on and the ale overflowing the pitcher and spreading over the floor, her face in her tear-sodden apron, crying her eyes out. They shook her and asked the cause of such sobbing. Mutely she pointed to a hatchet stuck in a timber overhead. "What

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of that?" She gulped and made doleful answer, " I saw that hatchet and I said to myself, 'Suppose I get married and have a child who will grow up to wait on the tables in this castle. Someday my child would be sent down here to draw ale and that hatchet might fall and kill her. H o w would I feel then?' " The tale stops just there; for anyone can see all she needed to do to stop her expanding worry was to reach up and haul down the hatchet. But worry paralyzes the will. It anchors us to the rocks in the whirlpool and we do not cut the rope and row off; that would take decision and our decisiveness is gone! Mr. Chesterton once said, " A small child alone in the dark can invent more hells than Swedenborg." (Why not Dante?) The prevalence of incipient phobias is well known; few of us are without pet dreads which we faithfully nurse. We "borrow trouble" so prodigally that we go insolvent; it exacts its pound of peace. Of what are we most afraid? Are we afraid of sickness? Many of us are, and we have selected the malady on which to center our worry. We may even imagine ourselves into nervous ills, and as for organic troubles we can carry our elaborate dread so far that one may wonder whether the discomfort of the actuality could be much worse than the prolonged poignancy of apprehension. Are we afraid of death? The fear of dying is more widespread than is admitted. H o w few there are who face the thought with any equanimity. (To do some of us

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credit the thought is not always only personal; others' safety is involved.) Postponement of all thinking on the subject is so much simpler. Every minister knows there is no more perplexing problem with which he has to deal than that of procrastinating people who have no reserves of belief in immortality when they come to need them most. I still remember a widow upstairs at a home funeral who clutched me and gasped, "In the fifteen minutes before the service make me believe something comforting! I have no faith at all." She did not even know the vocabulary in which I might attempt consolation. But her fears were definite enough; she had held those continuously, although at arms' length. An unquiet conscience keeps fears going, too. Confession of sorrow and endeavor at reparation are evaded, for that would be decisive, and fears poison the will to inertia. A n inferiority complex, bred on failures, pyramids caution and timorous cowardice until apprehension freezes the marrow. In a Child Guidance Clinic a child I know was examined for diagnosis of the palsied backwardness which hindered his progress in school. The clinician discovered more than a normal I. Q. but, counterbalancing, a panicky blockade in the presence of new material or a new situation. The child's development was all in his clear-cut fears; in them his I. Q. was expert. Everyone lives true to the picture he has of himself in

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his heart of hearts. If he believes he is a failure, he will be. If he feels he is unequal to life, he will be. If he holds his misgivings in the focus of fascination they will hypnotize him to their pattern. Negative imagination plus negative emotion bring ague of the will. It is not easy to make imagination and emotion rightabout-face out of fears toward confidence. For man has inherited a stock of fear greater than he now needs. The cave man may have needed it to preserve him from sabretooth tigers but now there are not many of them roving our streets. In his physical life, except in war or dire emergency, our terrors are now pretty much excess baggage. We may need a small bit of caution, but stark fear is largely unemployed and Satan finds work for idle fears to do. Fear must be transmuted into sane prudence and forethought; it must not be encouraged to festering malignancy. Before we turn to hints for constructive emotion it may be well, although not entirely pleasant, to treat one or two more ramifications of negative imagination and emotionalism. Such as self-pity, with which a later chapter deals.

V The Temptation to Melodramatize H E very fact that I and Myself are inevitably

T

audience and actor involves the temptation for Myself to try histrionics. The audience-self sits

back and watches and listens to the acting self and praises or sneers the performance Myself puts on. If no one can live without some degree of self-esteem then Myself, by

fair means or foul, will try for it. There are legitimate means to self-esteem which go with sincerity. There are thievish endeavors for self-esteem which go with artificiality. There is a difference between good drama and " h a m " melodrama. When it is said of someone, "Oh, he always dramatizes himself in every situation," it is possible that melodrama is meant, not authentic drama. For the good actor worthy of our praise is the one who has lost himself in his role and is selfless. H e is all-out for the animating urgencies of the part and wants the meaning of its words and deeds revealed for its own sake. H e is selfless. But the melodramatic actor is an egotist. H e thinks of his part as a "fat" one, to be exploited for personal applause. H e lives

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for his claque. H e poses and struts and mouths and orates and overdoes in the hope of an ovation. Mawkishly amateur, he has no restraints and no humility. H e parades like a pouter pigeon. He's A poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

The stage is not necessarily a public one. The audience is first of all the critical "I" which knows "hooey" its very first moment. When you or I "let ourselves go" and rant or preen or overact a part, that audience-self sneers "Buncombe!" Good drama is not only legitimate but ideal. What is good drama? Let's analyze it. Our day by day existence is made up of successive details, most of them not particularly thrilling in themselves. The microscopic items of prosaic routine are chores to the man or woman who sees no organic significance in them. But good drama selects evidential details, which reveal some underlying truth or vital force in process. Every bit of business and every line of the script utters something of this underlying essentiality. Nothing which does not advance the plot has a place in the whole, but the tiniest incidentals manifest the innate spirit. They are finger-posts. In a very real way every item of the drama

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is sacramental of its theme, outward and visible form for its inward and spiritual intrinsicality. The many, many variousnesses speak some unity of significance. W e feel the crescendo toward a recognizable climax. W e are getting somewhere, as Eliza crossed the swirling river on successive cakes of ice. We protest against meaninglessness. Our whole nature is hungry for a Life which is one developing consummation. We hate non-significant circumstance. We loathe non-sense. Our constant effort is to relate the moment's deeds and words to something continuously noble. We attempt to express ourselves, and by the expression of ourselves to express the ideals and urgencies and universalities and humanities which make us what we are becoming. This is good drama. The Greek original of the word means something wrought, not only something done. It is both revealing and creative. Myself when truly Myself is thus motivated. "I" am satisfied only when Myself makes My actions speak something vital, no matter how incidental those actions are. But melodrama is emotionalist. It is trashy and absurd. It just is not "true to life" with any fealty or sobriety. It betrays itself by its ridiculous, inartistic unrealism. Why can't the poseur know how much of a fool he makes himself. He befools no one but fools — and himself. By drowning out the shocked mutter of the audience-self first of all.

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A "sophisticated" twenty-year old girl came from "the great city" to her new town (of necessity, she let it be known, because her father's business had Robinson-Crusoed him in this backward place) and languidly walked down the main street, sheathed in a black velvet dress, smoking her cigarette in a crimson holder nine inches long, leading a white Russian wolfhound! And she complained that no one seemed to want her acquaintance! The manikin walk, the affected accent, the drooping eyelids, the bored condescension — these were poor melodrama, surely practiced before a mental mirror. Or there may be a wallowing in humility. A n inner Uriah Heepishness. It may be self-beguiling to ape an inferiority complex but it is weakening, too. There are sentimental Tommies of all kinds, this one included. Or there may be an overdoing of self-extenuations. The alibi artist paints himself as the victim of circumstances. He drowns himself in crocodile tears over his hardships. He may even Hamletize, soliloquizing to himself his flirtations with the idea of suicide. Of course the man who commits suicide is the one who has never talked of it openly and only does it when cornered. Usually the idea is histrionic; the minor Hamlet is luxuriating in cheap melancholy, most perversely enjoying himself. "You don't mean it!" says the audience-self, sardonically cynical and flatly disgusted. What things we say and do in anger! In the heat of

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a tantrum we choose the superlative bitter word rather than the temperate synonym which on sober thought we know we mean. We never overact as completely as when we rant and rave. We know we will have to retract the explosive things we've said, once we have blown off. W e shall repent and eat humble pie. The audience-self already knows this. Or perhaps our melodramatic pose is of the "strong silent type" which "suffers in silence" but tries to show the strain of repression. The catalogue of melodramatic inebriates and poseurs is lengthy indeed. No more of it! We want to live in the meaning of life. But we can only do so by such complete commitment to the meaning of life that egotism is not thought of. We are a part of a most august and noble drama — the drama of the divine in the Universe. We should be so moved by it that we lose ourselves in its Cause and surprisingly find ourselves thereby. The Cross on Calvary was drama. Not melodrama. The Last Supper was drama. Not melodrama. Something was wrought by the life contributed through it. There's nothing wrong with drama, for it is not self-conscious. There's almost everything wrong with melodrama, for it is egotistic. True drama is signed with the sign of the cross.

VI The Tear-Bottle Habit ASHIONS change but human nature does not change as fast. Clothes and customs vary through the years, but human traits do not. Under the queerest externals the human character plods on in its familiar characteristics. Go into any museum of antiquities and try to look back of the strange relics to the humans who produced them. What ideas did they have when they wrought these fantastic creations? Here, for instance, in a Babylonian or Egyptian display, is a case filled with iridescent, goldfiligreed, small glass bottles, each with its mouth shaped like an eye-cup. There are rings, into which chains must once have been clasped. Once each bottle swung on the breast of some fashionable Oriental. These are tearbotdes. For once in far distant times there was superstitious adulation for tears. No tear was permitted to dry and be forgotten. These bottles testify to the saving of tears. If the ancient must weep he used no handkerchief to mop his wet eyes; he unstoppered his tear-bottle, and put it

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first to one eye, then the other, to garner every salty drop. When the current bottle was finally filled he stoppered it tight, lest any precious tear evaporate, and donned a new, empty tear-bottle against the next gust o£ affliction. On some shelf in his boudoir would stand the array of brimming tear-bottles, hermetically sealed, and the proud filler of these mementoes of grief could take his friend by the hand, lead him on tiptoe to that sanctum of sorrows and with hushed reverence display them. "See how I've suffered!" he would quaveringly boast; "There is the measure of my agonies! See the mute evidence of all my pitiful misfortunes!" W e may be sure that honest, forthright, rugged, courageous folk wore no tear-bottles. Men and women of any greatness of soul did not try to cry such gewgaws full of encouraged tears. It was the pampering, querulous whiners who wept most copiously at slightest mischances. (It only takes one pea under twenty mattresses of swansdown to reveal a princess by her petulance, you recollect.) Decently brave people had no patience with tear-bottle absurdities. They were not measuring their hardships by the liquid ounce. The writer of the fifty-sixth Psalm must have been typical of many another sturdy warrior whose good sportsmanship kept him wholesome, as he scornfully exclaimed against such self-softening affectations as the tear-bottle habit, "Put Thou my tears into Thy bottle, O Lord!" Let God count up this man's griefs and

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pains if H e would: the man himself had not time nor desire to be a miser of melancholies. He had a work to do, a battle to fight, a challenge to answer, a joy to win. God would do the pitying: as for himself he knew that selfpity is spiritual disaster. The tears in a tear-bottle turn to poison. None of that poison for him! Tear-bottles are no longer worn. We no longer dangle these opalescent, bejeweled ornaments around our necks, ready for expected sobs. But has the tear-bottle habit ceased? Do we, perhaps, still enjoy our sorrows and count up our hardships with self-congratulatory glee of martyrdom? Do we succumb to the poison of self-pity? The tear-bottle habit is none the less real for the invisibility of the actual vial. H o w full is mine, I wonder? How full is yours? Self-pity is a maudlin sentimentalism! The greater the sorrow or hardship the less thought of a tear-bottle, for the dignity of deep suffering is too noble for easy torrents of tears. The more vapid the trouble the more copious their rain. Great sorrow cleanses, purifies and transfigures the soul. There is hallowing beauty in the major pains of life. A true person meets real agony squarely and it sublimates him. Mystic strength deepens. His travail is signed with the sign of the cross. Like the Master Who in His suffering triumphed over it, the true hero or heroine emerges from his Gethsemane purified as by fire. H e wears no tear-bottle. God remembers His Strug-

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gle, for He has been through it with him and has become his victory. Do not misunderstand this chapter; it is not against true grief. There are real tragedies, tragedies that make us descend into hell, ache that puts us on the rack, poignant anguish that pierces the heart as with the sword of Mary's pangs. There are enough bitter cups to drink of without adding the shallow emotionalism which a tear-bottle wearer excruciates out of mere frets and bothers. The tearbottle habit is the sure sign of a cowardice which needlessly enslaves the petty wailer to minor circumstance. The self-pitier tries for no mastery of existence, no captaincy of his soul, no overcoming of the world. Rather he glories in the white flag of surrender and luxuriates in misery-lets. He really enjoys the poor health of his spirit. With blasphemous unctuousness he apes crucifixion, posing to himself as a martyr and purring compassionately under his breath, "There, there! Poor abused, afflicted, ill-treated, persecuted, outraged, innocent dear! Look into the mirror and see how your halo becomes you!" Self-pity begins ever so subtly. Its first symptom is probably an exaggerated emphasis on wrongs. Smile-bottles have had no such prevalence as tear-bottles. It is not so easy to capture and bottle smiles. Unless in the soul, by resolution. W e come so glibly to take blessings for granted! But we never get used to evils. It is easy to let vivid apprecia-

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tion of steady happinesses fade and fail until they evoke no thrill. Perhaps this is because no evil is ever a legitimate element, germane to a personality made for divinity and its joy. While, for the same reason, satisfactions slip into our essential nature and are merged into its fibre. At any rate, the instinctively resentful protest against wrong proves to us that God, too, is against it with His whole being. Yet this is no excuse for failing always to feel blessings to their full. We take more note of the drama of evil than the drama of ecstacy. "Good news is no news," runs the newspaper adage, playing up gangsterism and salacity more than the contributions of the benefactor and the idealism of the hero, because we want sensationalism. We grow expert as flaw-finders. The word critic once meant the finder of good as well as bad, but now it implies a gleeful discoverer of faults. We ourselves probably give our condemnations and indignations freer rein than we do our admirations. We are very frugal of praise. Somehow it bolsters up our own self-esteem so to pounce on others' short-comings that we grow connoisseurs of imperfection, but not of perfection! And it is not far from this defensive artistry of criticism to the feeling that we ourselves are not appreciated at our true value, that our great merits are underestimated, that nobody loves us as we deserve: therefore out to the garden we'll hie and eat worms!

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We feel emergency more keenly than rescue. As evidence of this, our hearts always stir within us at prayers for the sick and we say the Amen with sincerity. But who asks for prayers of thanksgiving for recovery or for the fact that no prayers for the sick have been necessary? It is hard to believe that only the few who come to give praise to God, like the one cleansed leper out of Jesus' ten, are the only ones healed by the Great Physician. If one is ill enough to be prayed for, if he recovers he is delivered enough to be grateful. But the time of emergency is evidently more impressive than the time of vigor. As the laddie felt who ended his bedtime prayer, "O God, take care of me all this long, dark night. I'll take care of myself day-times, thank you." Tear-bottle misemphasis, friends! So is all that "realism" of the futilitarians, of which we have previously said our say. Beloved Mrs. Laura Richards' fable of "The Potter" says it too: — A potter wrought at his wheel, singing as he wrought, turning out crocks and pipkins of red clay. They were clumsy of shape and rude in the making, yet they served to hold meal and milk, and the poor folk bought of him. But ever, as he shaped the clay, the potter said to himself: "Someday, someday, I will make a cup of gold for the Prince's drinking!" N o w and again, when he was well paid for his pots, he would get a bit of gold and put it by. This small hoard was precious to him as sunlight, and bit by bit, little coin by little coin, it grew, till one day he had enough. Then he left his clay, and with care

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and loving pains, his lathe turning to the beat of his heart, he fashioned a little cup of gold. "It is small," he said, "but it will hold wine for a single draught." And he set it in the sun among his pots where it could be seen of the passers-by. Presendy rode by the Prince and his court, and saw the pots, and on one the sun shining. "Look!" said one of the courtiers, "if the potter have not gilded one of his clay pipkins!"

Oliver Wendell Holmes claims that happiness in life depends on the liver, but we suspect in what sense he uses the word. Sometimes for tonic turn back to Martin Chuzzlewit to get the stimulus of Mark Tapley. Some of his readers claim that Dickens overdid this stalwart champion of "jollity." However, there is not too much of him in the total book, nor in the world. You remember appreciatively how Mark was always wondering how bad his fix must be before jollity in it would be a credit? H e almost never found things so unmitigatedly wrong that there was not some element of good which would make his cheerfulness too reasonable. Even seasick and forlorn in the steerage of the nightmare packet which was carrying him and his master to unknown America he admitted it might be creditable to keep up his spirits there, but the fact that the credit was such a comfort detracted from the sheer merit! In the abject misery of the malarial swamp, his loved master down with the fever, their little fortune reft from them, a whole hemisphere from any friend, he at

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last went outside the log hut, thumped himself a tremendous blow on the chest by way of reviver and said aloud, "Now, Mr. Tapley, just you attend to what I've got to say. Things is lookin' about as bad as they can look, young man. You'll not have another such chance for showing your jolly disposition, my fine fellow, as long as you live. And therefore, Tapley, now's your time to come out strong, or never!" Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott were both lame. Byron called on Scott to learn the secret of his quiet peace. Byron needed to, for he whimpered inwardly with self-pity; he wore an over-sized tear-bottle. Scott had no advantage of wealth or social standing, but he was too much the gentleman to tell his caller the secret was only a difference in courage. When you or I take ourselves in hand, get over onto the pou sto of sane self-knowledge, tighten the belt and fight back against physical or mental pain with a smile, we find there comes a ratification of our courage from outside and above us. It depends on the direction one faces whether one sees sunshine or shadow. The secret of courageous wholesomeness is inside the heart. The will operates from within the wilier, but "God helps those that help themselves." As Hugh Redmond exclaims, "It isn't the size of the dog in the fight that counts but the size of the fight in the dog." He also hints that the spiritual barometer is like the weather barometer; in the low pres-

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sure times look out for storms. And that the true temperature is always quoted "in the shade." Contrast, as Turgenieff did, Hamlet and Don Quixote. The play of Hamlet and the playful satire of the Knight of the Rueful Countenance were published almost simultaneously, as if the melancholy Dane needed to be confronted by the grotesque but magnificent Don. For with Turgenieff, despite all extenuations and sentimentalist pity for him, it is difficult to prove there is anything fundamentally heroic in Hamlet. But the absurd Knight is fundamentally heroic. Didn't Shakespeare intend us to "see through" Hamlet? According to the concepts of his day and according to the commands of his ghostly father Hamlet had a forthright work to do of righteous vengeance, but, naturally aghast, he doubted, boggled, postponed and evaded that duty, assuming madness to gain irresponsibility, asking more and more proof of the culprit's guilt, after many months accomplishing his intention only by accident. There he sits, posing in black velvet before a mental mirror, orating grandiloquent melancholy, luxuriously sorry for himself. As he spreads his cloak in carefully careless folds on the carven chair in the spotlight of his own conscious pathos, puts his trembling finger to his sweating forehead and chants the measures of his well-rehearsed soliloquy, he is actually asking whether it is better to evade his duty by committing suicide or to be heroic and by taking arms against a sea of troubles to end

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them! Didn't he really know the answer? He is only restrained from suicide by craven dread of bad dreams after death! I see him catching and cherishing every tear in a gold-mounted tear-bottle! T o this had the young man come who had a ghastly problem too big for his years. I prefer old Don Quixote. Yes, I know how ridiculous he looks, mounted on his rickety bag-o'-bones nag, clad in rusty armor, a barber's basin for a helmet askew on his bald head. I know he fights with windmills, thinking them giants. And he gets tumbled from the saddle by the whirling arms, only to pick himself up, set his lance at rest and plunge again to the attack. Nevertheless I remind you that even if he did mistake win Imills for giants, he did not histrionically arrange himself on a mossy bank and with orotund voice orate to himself, " T o be or not to be." The chivalric loon had spirit. The Don was nobler than the Dane. Yet Hamlet is a popular hero and we laugh at the Knight of the Rueful Countenance! God stab our spirits awake if we are this undiscerning! Many an admirer of Jesus knows He was speaking from personal experience when He spoke the parable of the house founded on a rock. The house of His soul was thus grounded. Let the floods come, let the gale blow, let the tempest do its Golgothan worst — His soul's stability was unconquerable. The fundamental virtue is courage! All the other virtues get their stamina from courage. Love is courageous, pa-

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tience is courageous, faith is courageous, cheerfulness is courageous. No matter what the burden may be, there's a way to carry it that multiplies strength! Like charity, heroism begins very much at home. Pain is a nettle; it is least harmful bravely grasped. The cross has a square opposition at its center, as if a brave man's dagger had been cleanly thrust through an iron bar. The tear-bottle wearer made his bauble a fetish. Those who are signed with the sign of the cross are committed to courage. As one sufferer from crippling invalidism exclaimed, "If you have a cross to carry, carry it! Don't drag it!"

VII Declarations of Independence O O D S are the result of slavery to circumstance.

M

When things go wrong moods tend to correspond. They are chameleon on fortune or

misfortune, taking their color from chance luck. In them we have the real conditioned reactions the psychologist

proclaims. They are spinelessly subservient to the accidents of life. There is no declaration of independence in them. Imagination must first disentangle itself from the coil of mood to have its positive opportunity. There can be no emotion for an ideal until the ideal is clear enough to attract it. We cannot love what we do not see sufficiently for it to exert its charm. N o matter what a long-established habit it may have to break, imagination must be set at liberty with its face toward a sunrise. Freedom begins with this deliberate sundering of the bonds of the negative. Just as one does setting up exercises in the morning, so a routine of imagination's exercises must be done. Perhaps we must even sit still, clench our jaws and start out on picturing the desirable in enlarged detail. Asking

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what would we want ourselves to do or be under such and such conditions? A course of constructive action can be mapped out which will lead the mind to a higher point of view and broader horizons, and give it anticipatory zest for the fulfilment of the clearly visioned possibility. It is surprising how amateur most of us are at constructive imagination, although adept at worries. Our resistance to unpleasantness is more feeble than we realize until we come to ourselves and attempt to replace mood by positive emotion. "Father" Taylor, the waterside evangelist of a former Boston day, was a pungent and forthright handler of problem men. He was once wrestling with a sniveling derelict who whined his alibis for failure until the old man was nauseated by him. This human jellyfish whimpered that he had come of good family, had been given a college education and a good business start. "But," he quavered, "the pressure of hard luck on me was too great. Everything conspired to crush me in. You can't dream what the outside pressure on me was." Father Taylor was unable to hold his indignation longer: he exploded; "Outside pressure? Outside pressure, man? In the name of God, where are your inside props?" Do we need to be reminded of inside props? We'll find them if we will search them out. Until we may even come to the philosophy of the unknown man who wrote of flies in ointment:

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Adversity has taught me T h e infrequent good to prize. I rejoice to find some ointment In my little pot of flies.

When the English king dedicated the Canadian memorial at Vimy Ridge he stood on Canadian soil in the midst of France. Vimy Ridge was then as much a part of Canada as is Montreal. In spite of the fact that it was in France it was not of that country, for France ceded those acres to Canada. Over them flew the Canadian flag. Transpose this into terms of life and we have our analogy over again. Analogically it is possible for us to be in but not of environment — extra-territorials of wholesomeness. Or, not unduly to labor the point, in the early days of radio (how recent they really were!) a Broadway window displayed the newest sets. Over the set in the center hung a big sign, "Buy this set and tune out New York!" Parabolic, again, but pertinent. In His "High-Priestly prayer" lesus said of His disciples, "I pray not that Thou shouldest take them out of the world but that Thou shouldest keep them from the evil. They are not of the world even as I am not of the world." He intended that each of His followers should be an extra-territorial bit of Heaven in Jie midst of existence. "The Kingdom of God are ye," He said to them and to the general crowd; "The Kingdom of God is within

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(amidst) you." This does not mean we are to be "otherworldly," if that word means impractical pietism, unctious cant and sanctimonious illiberalism. It only means the unconditioned spiritual life. St. Paul writes: "Be ye not conformed to this world but be ye transformed by the newness of your mind." Everyone lives from a center to which he alone has access. Into the inmost citadel of the soul no one or no thing can come, to which the gate has not been opened from within. Even God cannot force His way into man's inmost will if the man maintains his isolation from Him. Alone in all creation man can look up into God's face and perversely say, "I know what you want me to do, but I won't do it and you can't make me!" The perilous treasure of choice is an absolute, outright gift. Character is the sum total of consistent decisions we make for ourselves. We are self-determining. If we give ourselves to the earthy it is our self-determined conformity, and the slavery of spirit to accident is by our own weak choice. If we maintain our autonomy of spirit amidst external fortunes and misfortunes we may by that same unconditioned choice admit God into our citadel of will. But again it is by our own choice. God apparently did not want automatic conformity to His purposes, as a stone in the grip of gravity falls downward to the earth. If our own affectional nature is any guide to His (and of course it is!) we would not call it love if our beloved own had

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no free choice but to be ours. The whole zest of being loved is precisely because it is a free choice by the lover to give himself: the background of thought must constantly be that there were many chances that he would not so choose but that of his own will he did! God sets us off from Himself in freedom; even ready to run the risk of losing us, for the sake of letting us and Him have the high experience of our falling in love. Indeed one may explore a little into something usually considered dogmatically theological but which has its clue in exactly this autonomous choosing of the divine — the Incarnation or divinity of Jesus. May I frankly say I can accept no unhuman magic kind of divinity for Him; for He Himself contradicts that interpretation, refusing to be set apart in an uniqueness of genus we cannot share in our degree. He is no wild fact in the universe, but related to its creative surge into never-ending, qualitative betterment. I make a distinction between the magic and the miraculous. As a lad I once tried to go behind the scenes while a magician was preparing to give a Sunday School entertainment. And I saw what I was not intended to see. I saw the rabbit stowed away which was later to be produced from the hat. I knew then that magic forbids understanding: it succeeds by numbing comprehension down to befooled bewilderment. I have never revised my small boy's conclusion that despite appearances: "Y'know, magic really ain't!" Miracle, however, is the as-yet-

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uncomprehended initiative of higher powers which are thenceforth to be shared; as the first locomotive across the prairies was a miracle to the Indians. Miracle is the startling beginning of that which is thereafter to be put at our disposal. It is the qualitative New! It is like the first land-creature, crawling up out of the water by an impulse which staggers the imagination but which is unquestionably verified, involving a new kind of existence — warm-blooded, free-moving, air-breathing. St. Paul calls Jesus the pioneer of life, the first-born among many brethren, with whom we are joint heirs. Jesus said, "I call you not servants, for the servant knoweth not what his Lord doeth, but I have called you friends, for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you" and, "He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also, and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father." (i.e. into the indwelling One?) His processes of thought were akin to ours; He was no marionette hung on wires from Heaven, going through the motions those wires made inevitable and meaningless for our humanity. He was no celestial legerdemain trickster. But he was miraculous in qualitative divineness. And we ourselves know the way such divineness enters life if we will do our share. The way to do our share is this: our conscience or moral intuition speaks to the citadel-dwelling power of decision. Such intuition comes from outside and above;

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for all moral purposes it is the urge of the divine applicant at the portcullis of the will. If I welcome that motivation unto the citadel and make the divine will my will, in that moment there is nothing to my life but the divine. I can see the more-than-theoretical possibility of a will which always decides to admit the divine and answer by its realization Jeremy Taylor's classic prayer, "O, God, grant that there shall be but one will between us and that Thy will, one life between us and that Thy life." And you may have been anticipating the standard quotation from Augustine, "Our wills are ours, we know not how: our wills are ours to make them Thine, O God." In Jesus the Christian sees a life "tempted in all points like as we are" and facing fresh decisions every moment yet never failing to choose the intuitive divine, until there was nothing in His life which was not divine. Divinity and humanity are not like oil and water that will not mix and merge. Humanity is basically of the God-stuff and only our own perversity can make it seem alien, when we take our bit of divine potence and use it against God. Is it too trite an illustration to mention Holman Hunt's painting, "The Light of the World," hanging (until the war) in St. Paul's, London? As you know, it shows the risen Master, still thorn-crowned but majestic, standing with a glowing lantern, knocking at a door and bending his head to listen for a responding footstep within. The anecdote is handed down that when the painting was first

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finished the artist invited sundry friends for a private view. After some time one intimate drew him aside and tactfully murmured to him, "Holman, that's a wonderful picture. But the greatest artists sometimes miss little details. Do you mind if I tell you you've forgotten to paint a handle on the door?" The painter threw back his head and laughed. "My dear friend," he answered, "don't you know there is no handle on the outside of the door of the human heart? It has to be opened from inside. Do you think Christ would stand and knock if the door were open or the latchstring out?" The perilous treasure of choice! But also what glorious possibilities of consummate individuality it brings! Provided the independence of the will is maintained for right decisions! There are those who feel that life is determined by outside pressure and stimuli, and that there is therefore no such thing as free-will. This may be true of those who have spinelessly capitulated their birthright and are now led by the nose at the tail of the chariot of chance, but it is not true of those who maintain their invulnerable integrity. Freedom is not easily preserved. Admittedly there are too few who defend their liberty and keep the citadel impregnable against its battering or insidious enemies. T o allow the besieger even inside the postern-gate of wistfulness is to have admitted a conqueror. "Thou shalt not covet" is good psychology, for to covet the wrong thing is to have surrendered in spirit.

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A n electric cord is made of conductive wire wrapped in insulation, that there may be no leakage of current and no short-circuiting. If the insulation is worn through what a sputter of sparks or waste of power there is. The electricity does not get from the dynamo to its luminous or mighty use. So with the human spirit; it is conductive, if insulated from circumstance in resolute independence. Then it may convey the divine dynamic to make personality glowing and effective, without leakage or danger. It is only the spirit which declares its independence that can commit itself constructively.

VIII The Sentinel at the Portal

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O W N in the subconscious are all sorts and varieties of raw material for living. Good, bad and indifferent material, of which the more or less finished product of character can be wrought — memories, inherited urgencies, fears, desires, hopes, dreams, imaginations, complexes, intuitions, instincts and emotions. They are so "werry warious" that it may even be better to differentiate between the subconscious and the superconscious, recognizing that some are unfit for inclusion in character, at least as they are, and that some others are the idealisms and conscience-magnetisms which, once incorporated in personality, will lift existence into Life. W e are not held responsible for the entire contents of our subconsciousness and we are reverently aware that we cannot be the creators of all that is in the superconscious. In between these two reservoirs of life-material stand the human will and the human intelligence, able to pick and choose which elements are to be woven into individuality. We are held responsible only for what we choose; for character is the sum total of choices.

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In character worthy of the name these choices are made according to some standard of consistency. Or it may be a temperamental standard, unconsidered and naive; it may be the standard of momentary whim, unworthy to be called a standard at all, so that personality is like the strange assortment of glittering minor junk a crow would pick up; it may be the standard of informed conscience, rigorously selective. Mood may be the criterion, or disciplined idealism may be. The will may enter into this selective process or it may be so weak it can be overridden. For all the subconscious components and, to a less arrogant degree, all the superconscious components, too, are urgent. Insistently they crowd into our living unless we set a sentinel at the threshold of embodiment. Freud calls this sentinel the censor. The censor-sentinel allows only those impulses to enter which have the password issued by the central, enthroned self. Preferably this password will be given only to motivations friendly to the best; not allowed first to this rabble and then perhaps to that better group and then indiscriminately back to the thuggish or the childish. Worried people often consult their ministers or psychiatrists because of their strange dreams, unworthy longings and unseemly wandering thoughts. They hold themselves responsible because they have these drifting vagaries or these besetting temptations. "Is that my real nature?"

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quavers the spiritually anemic one of the sore-beset. John Bunyan was driven nearly to distraction by a voice within that bade him "Sell Christ! Sell Christ!" (whatever that could mean) and he took it as a sin that he should hear it. The most perverse thoughts come elbowing unbidden into consciousness at the most incongruously sacred times, and dear but very human saints are shocked to find them there at such moments. But mark these words: no subconscious motivation becomes a temptation until it is encouraged. Only when it is gripped and held in the focus of the mind's eye, even at arm's length, does it become a temptation. A temptation is a coddled and therefore up-built urgency which has thus achieved fascination. Inexorably dismissed at the beginning it would be like the leering face at the window of the outer guard house on which the sentinel slammed the shutter or fired his gun, to be done with the unwanted trespasser at once. Given admission even to that guard house and parleyed with, it grows suavely plausible and will presently slip by after the sentinel is drugged with the wine of desire the intruder has brought. The converse of this is also true; no superconscious motivation becomes a temptation of the right kind until it is encouraged. Every thought we ever have is an incitement to action. Some, however, are only momentary and vague and therefore impotent. It is only the thoughts which get sustained attention that become urgencies and intentions. Who was it

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said, " I can't prevent birds flying over my head but I can prevent their building a nest in my hair" ? Perhaps the analogy of dreams will aid this realization. Suppose we call the censor "Selective Attention." When we are awake the censor is on guard at his post. There is a trapdoor in the floor, below which are all the subconscious forces, memories, etc., above mentioned. They want to get out. They push on the trapdoor. The censor is inexorable; he keeps the door fastened until he wants one of them. Out in front of the five senses, in the forecourt, Something objective appears. Selective Attention looks through his portcullis at this Something. It is perhaps green with white spots on it. Selective Attention turns to the trapdoor and calls down into the subconscious, "There's Something out in the forecourt that claims one of you memories. It is the green one with white spots." Instantly all the white-spotted green memories come up the steps to the trapdoor and claim the right to emerge. There is the memory of a green field and white daisies. Selective Attention looks out again and says, "No, you're not the right one. Go down again." There is the memory of the green felt of a billiard table with the white ivory balls on it. "No, you're not it," says the censor. Then comes the memory of sweetheart's green silk dress with the white polka-dots. Selective Attention peers out again and down again and exclaims, "Right at last! Come up and out!" The memory comes forth, the perception is

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joined to its proper memory in fond embrace, Selective Attention smiles gleefully, and the event we call recognition has come to pass, because Selective Attention was at his post. But when we are asleep and therefore Selective Attention is off guard, the trapdoor is ajar. While the censor's away the memories, imaginations and desires play. Now on the curtain of the eyelids comes a suggestion of white-spotted green and the memories come gaily out in unselected comradeship. Some such hodge-podge dream as this then results: — I am out in a green field gathering daisies, but as I reach for one in the shorter grass it begins to roll. I am puzzled and look about to find that the field is now a wide billiard-table and that over its green felt expanse are numerous ivory balls which I must keep on gathering. They capriciously elude me until in my pursuit I stumble and fall prone with my hand at last on one wayward ball, but beneath my palm there is no sphere at all. I lift my hand and what was a white ball is only a white circle on green silk. 'T is Sweetheart's dress-material: I recognize it and look up and there she is! There's no selective standardization to reality in such a dream. The sentinel's absence leaves vagaries undisciplined; fantasies and suppressed desires have their anarchic chance. Transpose this analogy into the more important moral field and we find the function of selectivity grown correspondingly more essential. The claimants for admis-

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sion through the ramparts throng with insistent appeals to the sentry's narrow gateway. They come with every moment of every waking hour, with every perception, every sensation, every casual thought. The subconscious pressure likewise intensifies: our moods, longings, natural forces, emotions, inheritances and influences are persistently crowding to the trapdoor, pressing together against its narrowly opened barrier. What suppliants will the sentinel allow their freedom up in the sunlit room of personality ? If there is to be any consistency to life therein selectivity must be stringently imperative. According to what voice from above him will he make his choices? Immediately dismissed thoughts and happenings have no opportunity to call forth desires and urgencies from the subconscious. It is only the encouraged possibilities which become temptations as they parley. They edge their way in, soon disarm the sentinel, and lift the dungeon door to let out the wrong forces into unimpeded possession of the castle. It is no longer a stronghold but is over-run by barbaric ruffians who wreck its ordered decency. Selective criteria have failed. M. Coue (who was a really deeper scientist than was indicated by the popular formula of "Every day in every way") rang the changes on this warning, "When imagination and the will are in conflict, eventually imagination always wins." This is only an alternate way of saying that encouraged thoughts become temptations and that temptations, encouraged by focused

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attention, became fascinations which hypnotize the will into coma. Thereafter, unless the will is aroused by command from the high tower of the divine in us, either chaos or consistency of insurgent rule comes to be, and what might have been a character is violated. T h e danger of a careless sentinel at the portal of the active, volitional self cannot be exaggerated. His selectivity is vital to any constructive progress in the art of living. Homogeneity of right qualities comes only by rigidly inexorable discrimination. There should be due notice, " N o admittance except to Constructive Motives." T h e warder must search would-be entrants to discover whether they have concealed negative proclivities. Affirmatives must be given scope to become right temptations: they deserve their birthright of attraction. This book may have seemed thus far to have contradicted its own theme by overmuch emphasis on " T h o u shalt nots." Yet the treatment of the shadowed side of the subject had to be got out of the way, that the sunnier side could then be studied. Hereafter the chapters are intended to be predominantly

constructive. Gusty

old

Carlyle

barked out, "Nerve yourself with affirmatives!" W e shall try to do exactly this. Positive imagination, up-building emotions, discrimination for the creative will to work upon, affirmative ideals — on these we learn to depend for character and its by-products of satisfaction. For, after all, the only way to have satisfaction in being

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the kind of self we are is to have that self coordinated and affirmative. The test whether we are integrated persons, constructively healthy, is simply to ask if it is at all pleasurable or comforting to live with ourselves. If there's no fun in being the self we happen to be, if there's no glow of stamina in time of stress, if there's no strong peace as the result of our self-management, then something's wrong. Without any other diagnostician than ourselves we know the difference between the feel of that blandness which goes with fatty degeneration of the soul and the feel of fitness which goes with vigorous morale. Without egotism we know when we earn any measure of self-respect. Negative thinking may be easier than positive, but by its fruits we know it. It may be easier to let ourselves go into moods of self-pity, morbid grudges, peevish cowardice, projected fault-finding or sentimentalism. The fundamental Christian virtues of faith, hope and charity may be more difficult to get started. But they pay goodly dividends of tonic wholesomeness. Faith is throwing your heart ahead of proof; it is confidence in adventurous intuition; it is trusting the compass of conscience on the open sea, even in a fog. Have we faith in faith ? Hope, says Mr. Chesterton, is not hope until things are hopeless. Certainly hope is not the cautious plotting of advance certitudes: it is "the anchor within the veil." Hope is not easy. Have we hope of hope ? Charity is forgiving the unforgivable; but this forgiveness

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is no mere soothing syrup or the finding of reasons why the sin was really not a sin. Charity is a forth-giving of the redemptive self, and it costs the forth-giver vicarious anguish. But there is no satisfaction in the world to equal that of knowing one is deeply of aid and comfort by his selfless gift of all he has and is. The greatest of satisfactions is charity. The early Christians called the glow which comes from such self-loosing self-losing "euphoria." Euphoria is the tingle of Tightness, the blessedness of which the Beatitudes speak. Once I was snowed in by a sudden Minnesota snow storm, out in a country cabin. W e had enough supplies, the furnace had sufficient fuel, the twilight settled down outside the snow-dimmed windows through which we had watched the universal cascade of swift whiteness. Flames danced their gay ballet along the six-foot logs in the fire-place and the only sound was their crackle of zest. Small son climbed up in my lap and wangled his head into the crook of my arm. My book was too dimly lighted for reading. W e watched the fire together. Laddie sighed a long sigh of drowsy content and sagely philosophized, "When things are just right, you know it, don't you?" W e do know. That's euphoria! The Master said "How can one enter into a strong man's house and spoil his goods except he first bind the strong man? Then he will spoil his house." There's a watchman on the tower and a sentinel at the strait gate.

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Their duty is to see that no negative obsession shall enter in at that gate, but only those ideas and ideals which make for euphoria. Once we have a taste of euphoria we may even adopt and adapt David's chant, "The divine is my rock and my fortress. The God of my rock: in him will I trust; He is my Shield, my high tower of salvation and my refuge. He hath delivered me from mine enemies." A prisoner in the inner gaol sat listening to the footsteps of the legionary pacing up and down the flagged corridor outside his door. He knew every detail of the sentry's marching, just when his steel-shod sandal would probably strike the projecting edge of the fifth slab of stone, how the left leg's forward swing would make the scabbard clank on the steel-studded straps of his belt, how the leathern jerkin would creak as he whirled to return at the end of his twenty steps. The prisoner smiled wryly. That guardsman was put there to hold him fast. He seemed so much the embodiment of Rome's power! Yet in reality he was the evidence of Rome's terror of this half-invalid prisoner. Or, more truly, of this prisoner's word of a Master Who was destined to conquer all force by good will and rule the hearts of men as Rome could never rule them. That guardsman was protecting Rome! The prisoner needed no such protection. He was not awed by Rome; his spirit was invulnerable; it could not be invaded by fear of Emperor, Sanhedrin, scourge, shipwreck, disin-

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heritance, persecution, never-ending misunderstanding or a martyr's death. Within his intrinsic soul all was glowingly serene. He himself was uninvaded, impenetrable, fortified, safe-guarded in the garrison of his being. There was a guard before its postern, the drawbridge was up and the portcullis down against accident or circumstance. He smiled. He picked up the stylus with which he had been writing and with his stiff fingers cumbrously wrote down this prayer for his friends: "The peace of God which passeth all understanding, keep sentinel guard over your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God and of His Son Jesus Christ." Paul wanted them to share his own euphoria. Do we share it?

IX Cross Your Bridges before You Come to Them! S it audacious to contradict a proverb? A proverb is

I

supposed to condense the experience of generations to pungent epitome. And who brashly dares to differ

with the wisdom of the generations! Yet that proverb which says "never cross your bridges until you come to

them" is not flawless. Perhaps the very time to cross them decisively is before we reach them — only really cross them! The trouble is that the borrower of trouble does not cross his bridges at all. H e comes to the near end of one, he stops with his toes this side of the planks, he wrings his hands and whines, "Oh dear! Oh dear! This is a terribly long, high bridge. I'm sure there are loose boards in its floor through which I may fall into the boiling torrent beneath. I don't know what lies over beyond it, either: it's all foggy there and I can't guess what ghoulish bogies lurk there in wait for me! Oh dear! Oh dear!" So he stands, inhibited by his foliating terrors, and ventures no foot onto the bridge. How much saner it is to test the bridge, get it repaired if it needs strengthening, and explore on the yon side to

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find the conditions there. Then the commonsense surveyor returns to the hither side and goes calmly about his routine. He knows what stretches beyond the bridge he hypothetically may have to cross someday but will more probably never need to use. H e is sure that the farther shore has no ogres about which to have qualms. He has done constructive thinking with affirmative imagination, and to that extent fear has been eradicated. Fear thrives on uncertainties and mysteries; the clear daylight of sanity dispels the unfair paralysis of the frightened soul. Fear is notoriously repetitious. Worry is indecision. Dread boggles at purely theoretical Gorgons. Nettles sting the trembler; dauntless folk grasp them firmly and they do not sting. Let's be specific. Have I some pet, haunting fear, like the fear of a tricky heart or cancer or of financial collapse? It wakes me up about two in the morning in cold perspiration? My flesh creeps; I lie staring into the velvet dark, tremulous and cowed ? The fee-faw-fum of Giant Despair harrows me into nervous panic? Someday, however, when the sun is shining both in the sky and in my spirit, I feel I am fit enough to deal decisively with my fear. I go to the shadowy corner of my soul where it lurks, awaiting opportune moments of unfitness; I drag it by the scruff of the neck out into the sunlight and stand it up against a wall to face me. Already it is strangely less ghastly than it was in the dark. ("Giant Despair had fainting fits on

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sunshiny days" you know.) I call God to my side, for stamina. Then I say to my nursed bugaboo, "See here now, you! I happen not to be in a blue funk this morning. See, for once there is never a quaver in my voice; I am in command of myself now and I intend to make the most of this valorous hour. Answer me straight: what is the very worst possibility you have up your sleeve? Look me straight in the eyes, and tell me clearly the direst details you have in your repertoire of hypothetical horrors. Hands up! I want to make sure you have no concealed weapons about you. Stand and deliver." Inexorably, I do not let that fear go until it has disgorged its utmost implication. A bit abashed, but nevertheless still on my feet and forcing myself to be dispassionate, I say to God (and myself), " N o w I know the possible worst. It probably never will occur, but if it does come there'll be a next hour through which I'll have to live. What ideally should be my reaction in that next hour? And there'd be a next day, too, and a next year. What, theoretically, should be my way to victory? What are my assets still? What has the Fear left me still to live on and for? There surely is some courageous ingenuity by which the real damage can be avoided or even made a stepping-stone to triumph. I have time to think now; I will not wait until the emergency swoops upon me (if it ever does) and blinds me by its sudden paroxysm. It is better to lay my plan of campaign in advance. Preparedness is a good policy for calm." So I set

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my constructive imagination to work until I find both the best antidote for my shuddering intimidation and the evolving possibilities of gallant pluck. I rehearse my plan in detail until it becomes familiar. Then, whenever my hobgoblin shows his leering face and threatens me, I screw my courage to the sticking-place of defiance and say into his teeth: "Yes, you may happen, and you won't be pleasant if you do. But if you do happen (as you probably won't) I know what I am going to do, despite you. My plan is so definite and my preparations so ample that I almost have only to press a button and the whole scheme goes into action. You see I have out-thought and outimagined you, old Fear! I have got beyond my terror by the blessed power of crossing my bridge before I come to it. If you come to pass I am ready for you!" Is this a saccharine fantasy ? Can affirmative imagination be thus harnessed to pull us out of the Slough of Despond? Such is the baleful hold of encouraged worries on us it may not be easy, but imagination can be right-about-faced from specialization in hysteric scares toward a specialization in up-built confidence. It can be done. At the beginning of the depression a fine young business man said to me, "Thus far it hasn't hit me and mine, except in minor ways. But it may. So my wife and I sat down the other evening and appraised our manner of living. We admitted we had been riding too unthinkingly on the crest of the wave. I have been making money and

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we have been having a gorgeous time, with no whim actually forbidden. Perhaps our principles have even been getting a bit flabby. We have been going with a gay crowd; nothing plainly wrong with it, but a little nonchalant about temperance in all things. If the crash hits us we'll have to cut out a lot of this speeded indulgence. So as a kind of game Mehitabel and I began to ask what things we could suppose ourselves without, without affecting anything vitally necessary. We made a list of our luxuries and another of our unavoidable minima. It was surprising how far down we decided we could pare our budget before anything obligatory was touched. The next question was inevitable; if we could go without these things if we had to, why not try out going without them now to make the experiment in advance and be sure? Therefore we are scaling down our whole manner of living approximately to the level of moderation, to see if we can still be happy. And are we? We are finding out more about satisfactions than we ever guessed: we are closer to each other and the children than ever before; we're finding time to re-read some of the books on our shelves; we are doing our own housework this summer and having great times with new recipes that save money. I have somewhat more cash to lay by, to help somebody else with and to give to causes I've come to know more deeply; I've taken on a Scout troop and my wife is tackling her French once more and teaching the youngsters, in case we can go abroad with

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them someday by-and-by. We never had so much zest for life as at this minute. The chap was right who said we may not have as much to live on but we've just as much to live for." T o conquer eventually we may as well conquer in advance. The man or woman in dread of sickness had best begin plans for a serenity no sickness can touch. Are you in dread of loss of employment? Begin to explore other possibilities. The modern world is full of folk who have invented unique new jobs and services, with necessity not yet always the mother of their inventiveness. What will you do with yourself when the time for retirement comes? Is old age to find you mentally unemployed and vapidly without interests? Hobbies can be begun which will provide mounting, lasting enthusiasm. Avocations can be grown into contriving enjoyment. Many a man is almost eager for the time when he can paint more steadily, learn Greek, write his book, spend a whole year in Devonshire or do over heirloom furniture for the grandchildren. Are you fearful of suffering? The Cross has a clue to conquest of this: the Master did not say for naught (in advance), "Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world." "In His agony He triumphed over it." Are you afraid of death? Qualitative immortality can be begun at any time; so that life in the communion of spirits is already a verified reality. Is your conscience wretched with its load of pro-

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crastinated failure? There least of all is it wise to drift on without purgation, the righting of wrongs or the balancing of accounts somehow. Are you holding doubt at arms' length, fearful to investigate truth lest you find it untrue? If so, how much faith have you now? Truth has only "its chains to lose and its liberty to gain." Carlyle exclaimed, " I want to live without opiates!" Anything is better than shillyshallying evasiveness. Out of the whirlwind the Lord hurled the query at Job, "Hast thou commanded the morning since thy days began?" The new day should be under command before dawn. "Faith is the substance of things hoped for." Why not retranslate, "Confidence won in advance gives realization." Some time ago, in a comic paper, there was the drawing of an elderly busybody who had thrust his umbrella into a wasps' nest. He was reaping the results! Under the picture was the sentence, "Life is generally what we make it." Spiritually this is unquestionable. Would we keep on, impeded by timidities and fears ? Then let's feed them with faithlessness, worry and indecision. Would we have confidence toward God and ourselves? Then let's feed confidence with commanded imagination, forward. The way to begin is to begin. Whistling to keep up courage t'.irough the dark commands the courage into being

The will to discover

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something lovable in the unlovely commands a search which presently becomes not a chore but an enthralling gusto. The command to love life, even under its most trying hazards, brings maturing love of life. Are we captains of our souls or not?

X Inside the Given N any conversation the casual utterance of the word

I

"limitations" makes someone bristle. There seems to be no word more sure to rouse irritation. " H e has

definite limitations" says someone about someone, but it is better that it should not be said about him in his hearing! Oh, I may parenthetically remark, " I know I have my limitations, too," but I hope to be contradicted and told how slight they are! Limitations are an insult to our dignity. They "crib, cabin and confine" our liberty of action. W e rebel, feeling them manacles which fasten us with only a short radius of freedom. T h e limitations of poverty, of ill health, of slow-wittedness, of preempted time, of having to work all the waking hours of every day to earn our bread and butter, of family complications, of interruptions, of governmental taxation, of advancing age, of the weather we wanted otherwise, of the global war — against such affronts to our desires we protest. They are unjust! H o w much strength is exhausted by useless rebellion. W e are no Houdini to whom a straitjacket was child's

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play. One of the kindergarten things we have to learn is that there are some conditions which are beyond our control. The aphorism we should axiomatically be taught is "There are two things never to fret about, that which we cannot change and that which we can change." The unchangeable is beyond our reach; if it is wrong the changeable must be changed; so why emotionalize? In mathematics, in science, and in philosophy there is a common term — the Given. The geometry teacher states the hard problem to her unenthusiastic class: "Given, two sides of a triangle at an angle of fifty degrees and of such and such a length, what is the length of the third side ?" A weakling pupil whines, "I wish the angle could be fortyfive degrees; the problem would then be so much easier." The teacher answers, "What is given is given. That's what makes the problem a problem. Work it out as given." Philosophers use the same term for the fixed framework of universal fact. Scientists accept what is. W e take things as we find them. Reality dictates its own stubborn actualities; they are what they are. Fire burns, water is H 2 0 , gravity pulls, winter comes, "time and tide wait for no man," and so on. My mother was wont to say to her boy, " ' T is a s ' t is, sonny, and it can't be any tizzer!" I may wish I had been borne a millionaire, but I wasn't, and no amount of wrenching wishfulness will make the fact different; it is Given. A girl may explosively wish she had been born a boy, but she was not; her feminine status

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is Given. You may expostulate that it is unjust that your strength is not Herculean for the task you have and that the doctor's diagnosis commands you to cut down your schedule one-third, b u t ' t is as't is, good friend! It's Given! We may angrily rake over the immediate past and know the world should not have gone to war, but the past is past and we cannot alter what happened. It avails nothing to quarrel with history (however much one may differ with histories). W e cannot know the future except vaguely by tracing out trends. The unexpected will always break in; "the best-laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley." The foreknowledge of free actions is an inevitable impossibility. Even God, we suspect, does not determine them, except in quality. The heredity bequeathed us cannot be otherwise. No business man can now prevent the last stock-market crash. Too much intensity of questioning and wishing about the Given shifts us from calm philosophy or poised diagnosis into vain emotionalism. Rebellion is too precious a power to be wasted on impregnable fact. Mark Twain sums up the case in his famous remark that everyone finds fault with the weather but no one does anything about it. (Except grumble, we add.) W e need all the rebellion we can muster for victory over the wrongs which can be righted. Rebellion is not wrong; it is rebellion against the Given that is wrong because it is so footless. We need not supinely accept injustices which

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can be adjusted, misunderstandings which can be ironed out, warped points of view which can be overcome by patient decency, bad government which can be voted out, enemies which can be conquered. But vituperative rebellion which merely "lets off steam" weakens the very tissues of the vain emotionalist's morale. While rightly headed rebellion, like faith, moves mountains. We should more carefully distinguish between real and unreal limitations. Some are immutable but some are only apparent. Often, however, the actual and the unreal are so tangled together that we have difficulty distinguishing the proper focus for right rebellion. Too frequently, for instance, we hear friends talk of their "cross." What does that glibly babbled term mean to them? Something inescapable, beyond all evasion? Or something about which to luxuriate, enjoying poor emotional health to the full? A little straight thinking on the origin of the phrase will not be amiss. Jesus and His cross have been the thesis of more muddled sentimentality and unclear morbidity than any other subject in the world's long record. Read the story for what it really says. Jesus was never in any doubt that His cross was a cruelty imposed on Him by malicious, misunderstanding enemies. If He kept on, true to the truth, this would be His punishment at the hands of the wrong-headed authorities whose power and pelf would be thwarted if His teachings prevailed. Of course, He could have obviated Calvary if He

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could have knuckled to Annas and Caiaphas and the other exploiters of the nation. But it was His basic limitation that He could not but be true to the truth: He must therefore take the consequences. At the end of the path He must travel loomed Golgotha. It took no magic revelation for Him to know what happened to those who hit Rome's crazybone — its repressive, merely external peace — or to those who jostled Palestine's bigotry-power complex. When He was only twelve years old there had been a cross bearing its horrific corpse at every crossroad in Galilee round about Nazareth, when the zealots Judas of Gamala led were nailed up as warnings. Crucifixion was the punishment Rome saved for non-Romans who dared infringe its policed monopolies of taxes and other enslavement, or for those whom the Sanhedrin handed over to Rome to kill on specious pretexts of anarchy, who in reality only defied the ritual formalities by which Pharisee and Sadducee throve. Jesus accepted the cross as an inescapable price for the course He must pursue, typical of the price many a faithful servant of high truth has to pay for the privilege of incorruption. The Cross was morally Given. He was nailed to it on Skull Hill, and there was limitation indeed! Jesus rebelled, but He rebelled inside the accepted limitation. He defied the cross to hold Him. His body might be spiked to those reared timbers but His life was not fastened fast to it, too. He was not crucified; they could

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take His body to do with as they would, He still would do what He chose with His soul. The crucifiers could not lay hands on His love, His living spirit, His forthsent, essential being. "Fear not those who hurt the body and have nothing else that they can do: fear only that which can invade the soul," was His philosophy. He was free. If they took this body, He would transfer His center of life to the lives of His friends and live in person in and from them just as really he had in and from the Carpenter's body. He took the tremendous hazard of His death with noble confidence that it would not be the end but a new beginning. His rebellion against death was discriminatory; it was inside the Given, but unhindered thereby. There is inventive ingenuity in finding such a way out and up for the spirit, in which there is the glow of victory. Something stings us into adroitness. Mankind has only one hero, the uncatchable man. There he stands, back to the wall, his broken sword useless in his wounded hand but his eyes alight with courage. The ring of foemen close grimly in, bearing doom on their daggers. The next moment will see him massacred. The leader of the captors raises his glimmering steel — and the hero with a laugh leaps, puts a foot on the very shoulder of the surprised attacker and is up on the wall-top and away. "By the help of my God I will leap over the wall," exults the Psalmist. The ingenuity of his eluding capture sends a new throb into our pulses. It is not so much the agility

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as the dexterous spiritedness to which we so respond. Ole Bull, playing a sonata, snapped an A string but continued the number through on the other three strings and got twice the applause he would have received if he had had no accident to overcome. There is no lack of reverence in remembering that even the august name of the Holy Spirit implies the Holy Spiritedness of God. With all the limitations we put on His purpose by our foolishness and malice and thus by the welter of idiocy, contentiousness, injustice and pain there is in the world, the indomitable deftness of an undiscouraged and ingenious God merits our adoring hurrahs! Nothing which happens can ultimately thwart Him. There is always a way in which He is able to win through to His mystic objectives of qualitative life for us. W e have a lot to learn from His artistry. Let us boldly take the acme of all problems, the problem of the death of one's own beloved. The bodily absence of the best-beloved is irrevocably Given. Rebellion against this inexorable fact will get us nowhere; we must school ourselves to accept it. Our world may be changed for us but we must live in the new world into which we have been thrust. To nurse our melancholy is only to increase our incompetence. The crisis of crises has come and we must admit it and choose our path. Probably in the first days after the catastrophic event we bereaved ones have each said over and over, "I cannot feel he is gone. It is just as if he were in the next room; I can feel his

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presence." Even amid the ache of desolation this awareness of Presence battles with the physical emptiness of our world. We must be told that we stand squarely at a parting of the ways. One road is the road of desolation. Down it we can travel into bitterness, into self-pity, into cowardly defeat. The other road is of the comfort ("strength together") of felt Presence. Along it we can travel into the realized Communion of spirits which is promised those who persevere. Practice makes perfect along either path. The Real Presence of the beloved is akin to the Real Presence Jesus promised His disciples, when comprehension of Him flowered and He became their hourly motivation and illumination. The lover who constructively defies death will say, "Yes, death can have his body; but it has not touched his life. His life is still mine. I have two souls in my one body now; for I am carrying him wherever I go and I want his life to go forward by mine. I will keep him close and real. Death, you cannot rive his life from mine! O grave, where is thy victory? He in me and I in him are one, closer than we ever were before, when we were divided into the separateness we always strove to overcome. Thank God that they who love are already in the path of a mutuality death cannot bar." A sane mysticism is the only right rebellion. Mysticism takes both grit and canniness for its affirmative development. Yet there are thousands who can testify that, because with the strength the beloved gave and with the kind of selfhood the beloved

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contributed himself to build they have clenched their jaws and ploughed on through the desolate days, the guardian Presence is theirs more than ever. They have literally made the best of a bad matter. By tragic necessity they have accepted what they must, but only what they must; they rebelled where there was still a loophole for mysticism defiantly to escape into the sunny open air of adult comfort and peace. Do not think it incongruous to bring into this serious chapter the prayer for an unconventional, unorthodox negro woman uttered by a fine old preacher, as quoted by Roark Bradford: "Lawd, I said de words ovah dis sinner like she had been a Christian, and I ain't sorry I done hit. I knows Yo' ways is mighty, an' sometimes too many for me to figger out in mah mind. You say, 'Don' deny my Name?' An' hyar lies Ole Crip, denyin' Yo' Name to de last. But I said de words on her, Lawd. You hyard me. But you know as good as me Ole Crip got in some mighty good licks 'round hyar in her day an' time. Lots er times, Lawd, when You an' me was asleep, she's out in de canebrake diggin' up yarbs or nursin' some sick baby, or somethin'. You couldn't a done no better yo'self, ef You'd been hyar, and dats sayin' a heap. "Hit wearied me and wearied me, Lawd, but I'm onto You now. Ole Crip is down yonder in hell, right now, Lawd, just like you promise? But I'm axin' You a prayer

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about her, Lawd, and You kin tell er I is de man which axed. Lawd, give Ole Crip a kittle er solid gold wid diamonds in hit to tote her water and stuff down yonder in hell in. And give her mullen leaves ten feet long to swage de pains er de sinners. And, Lawd, when my time is out, efn You's crowded up in Heab'm wid dese shoutin' Christians, well, just send me down to hell with Ole Crip. Amen." In other words it is thinkable that one can do Heaven's work in any Hell. When Bishop Booth of Vermont died after his too-short but noble ministry, his nurse said reverently to a friend, "I know where the Bishop is tonight. His soul has gone to hell." T o the friend's shocked look she added, "That's the only place he can be happy; there's such work to do there." Quite by coincidence, a comrade had said of General Booth of the Salvation Army, "He hungered for Hell." W e can find a joy (and remember no joy is so ineffable as the feeling we are helpful) at the heart of any limitations. "Play the game!" says the Divine coach of all living. Play the game? Exactly that! Who wants to play a game in which there are no difficulties? Does the golfer want a course in which there are no bunkers, no traps, no rough, no dog's-leg holes, in which he will automatically make a hole in one every time? No, the course which is so laid out with diabolic cunning that it is apparently impossible to play over is the very course the good golfer seeks. Like

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the famed Pine Valley course, there are more applicants for the privilege of attempting it than can be accommodated. Who wants to play a card game in which there are no rules, no conventions, no poor hands ? Even solemn Jeremy Taylor, rugged realist that he was, has a twinkling treatment "On Playing a Poor Hand Well." What boy or tomboy likes to play "Follow the Leader" in the wake of some timid, sleek little Fauntleroy who takes the queue of followers only across clipped lawns? The fun of following the right leader is that he makes them run risks, that he sets an abashing pace, that he worms through incredible knot-holes, walks tight-rope ridgepoles on insurmountable roofs, jumps unjumpable streams and in general blithely dares beating the handicaps, vanquishing threatening conditions, turning difficulties into stimulant challenges. There is always a "Highway" on through! A High Way! Job exclaimed, "Why is light given to a man whose way is hid, whom God hath hedged in?" N o matter who planted the hedges, they never completely encircle him. The hedges mark a path; they are directional. The Given is directional. It may be a maze, or a labyrinth, but there's a way out, to be found if we summon the morale clear-headedly to find it. That is the reason we call Jesus Master, because He mastered the artistry of inviolable Life in the midst of existence; of immortal worth amidst the temporary, its mischances and wrongs; of completely uninvaded soulhood, despite the Cross. If a car-

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penter in a hill village o£ a far-ofi province of a crumbling empire, "without honor in his own country and village and family," misunderstood or undercomprehended by his friends, persecuted by the exploiting authorities, betrayed by one of His own intimates, denied by another and forsaken in His hour of need by most other comrades, illegally tried, condemned and lynched by His enemies — if this Man with the shadow of the cross across His soul can cry, "Be of good cheer; I have overcome the world," He has a secret we'd best learn. Whoever and whatever we are! He showed with epochal clarity that life can be lived divinely inside any human limitations whatever. Therefore He is our revelation.

XI Balm and Honey and Spices T A R K necessities may suffice for existence, but these minimum necessities are not enough for Life. We want something more. Utilitarianism is all very well for grubbing along on a materialistic level, but who is content or athrill with utilitarianism? If Life is to be Life, enjoyable and satisfying and comforting and zestful, there must be gracious overplus beyond the grimly meagre demands of subsistence.

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The old patriarch Israel knew what there is in graces and aesthetic extras. He was hard-pressed. He and his sons and their families were starving. Grain had to be haggled for from that strange austere Prime Minister of faraway Egypt, who had cornered the market. After a first weary trek to his court to pay dearly for a pittance of corn, he had accused them of thievery, had kept one brother as a hostage against their pledge to return with the youngest brother in whom this enigmatic man seemed almost balefully interested. If anything should harm Benjamin, their father, already heart-broken by the long ago loss of Joseph, would indeed be bereft. But now they were starving and

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more grain must be got. Israel could not bear to send the lad Benjamin, yet he must if they were to keep alive. Why need this stern Premier be so extortir nate ? What would soften his hard heart? Could Israel ) it their dealings out of this bargaining harshness into an affair between gentlemen, on a humane, gracious basis? The patriarch therefore bade his sons, "Take of the best fruits of the land in your vessels and take double money in your hand, and carry down the man a present, a little balm and a little honey, spices and myrrh, nuts and almonds." This was not a mere bribe. He was trying to change the overtones of the transaction to transform the necessity into a warmer dignity, to initiate graciousness. The balm and honey and spices might win the upstage potentate from flintlike, mercenary harshness to thoughtful sympathy and friendly glow. How much of life's worth is in some extra gift of a little balm and honey and spices! They are not necessary but for our full content they are beyond the necessities. It is not "necessary" that the sky should be blue. For all sky-purposes a dingy brown sky might hypothetically suffice; but the blue of the spring sky is its balm and honey and spices extra. It is not "necessary" that cumulus clouds, piled like celestial meringue, should take on salmon-pink glory at sunset-time. But their brilliance is more than imperative : it is invaluable. It is not practically essential that leaves and grass should be so green in June. Black might

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suffice for grass-functions. It is not "necessary" that appleblossoms should cascade down the gnarled branches in a waterfall of fragrance and color. Surely Nature could have put out apples in some more purely mechanical way. Why need children's eyes dance so ? Why need youth be so lithe and rhythmic in every line? Why need yonder lassie's hair have such a burnished sheen? What is the need of music? Why do we ask for the artist's painting or the sculptor's statue? What is the justification of Gothic arches and Chartres windows? Wouldn't a barn of corrugated iron do as well to shelter us from wind and rain ? Beauty, charm, tact, artistry, winsomeness — these are not mechanically essential. But by them we really l i v e ! Balm and honey and spices are the joys of the heart. Bread-and-butter efficiencies do not count enough for our higher tastes. Eugene Field sat in a forlorn Chicago hash-house, dejected, forlorn, lonely and sick. The pert waitress snapped, "Whad ya want, guy?" And the laterbeloved artist of whimsy smiled wistfully and answered, "All I want is a saucer of sliced oranges and a few kind words." The striking girls of a mill town carried placards proclaiming "We want bread. But we want roses too." Balm and honey and spices! If it is not too sermonic, we must adjure ourselves to take more thought for such extras. I have a friend who must keep a supply of postal cards by him all the time. Whenever he hears something which might brace me up

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he jots down a penciled line — and for several days his postal is a pleasant reminder that someone cares. Bishop Lawrence, a genius at thoughtfulness, made a specialty of single roses for housed friends. A shared bowl of ice cream from a neighbor's ice chest on a hot summer night, a friendly joke passed on in a time of known strain, a telephone call to ask how a hard job is going, a human "good morning" to a routine servant of our welfare to show that we remember he is a human being, a smile of comradeship to the stranger in our pew, some tender tradition of courting days revived — balm and honey and spices extra. There is no true affection if it is only a residue left over from preponderant self-thought. W e betray our real proportion of intent by graciousness or its lack. W e could always find time and energy for balmhoney-spice extras if we cared enough. Graciousness is tact. Tact is so complete a sensing of a friend's emotions that one feels the delicacies of his mood. Tact reverences the nuances of a comrade's likes and dislikes. It is the Golden Rule intuitively carried through to refinement. Tact leaves the self-respect of the other person intact and aided. It is the appreciative response of spirit to spirit. There are those who pride themselves on what they call bluntness and frankness. They invade the self-respect of others with hob-nailed tread. They crush in egg-shell sensitivities. They do what they do in such meat-axe

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ways that their crude callousness does more harm than good even when they think they are doing good. The net effect of tactlessness is the victim's deflation. It is insensible and sub-human. It isn't what is done but the way in which it is done which counts most. Christmas packages have appeal for their wrappings as much as for their contents. Some quirk of inventive ingenuity, some touch of whimsicality, some clever uniqueness of phrasing adds artistry to our days. Are we too rushed for these embroideries of duty ? Are we driving too hard to take thought for extras? Are we too obsessed by important (?) t'.ings to be tactful or considerate or playfully humorous at times? The flavors of life are its best vitamins. What is graciousness ? It is thoughtfulness, of course. And thoughtfulness springs only from genuine interest, so genuine that a primary self-interest is forgotten. It is because we are in love. We theoretically agree on otherliness, but it is more rare actually to be so magnetized out of self-centeredness by affection that our center of being is over in the life of someone else. It is also skill. This skill comes to expertness only by practice. No artistry comes to perfection except by assiduous endeavor. No momentary sentimentality will build it. It is the concomitant of good breeding. Good breeding is from culture. Culture is awareness of beauty in all realms of life, — beauty of deed and word and Nature and virtue. Skeletal existence

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is thus clothed upon with wholesome flesh and modest garments. Good breeding is always Christian: real Christliness is always good breeding. When we hear the familiar words of the benediction or "say Grace" do we feel that truly spiritual life is not insipid, saccharine or on the other hand, grim and arid? Righteousness is not dreary. Balm is for healing Honey is for a sweetness which does not cloy. Spices are for zest.

Oh, it is blasphemous to present life with its bloom scrubbed oil. The asceticisms and the twisted logic which deal with proscriptions are anti-Life. We have subconsciously inherited so many false notions of human nature's innate vileness, its original sin of sour cynicism about its capacities, that there's small wonder we have the sad record of arid legalisms, the denial of the Grace of God to those who do not "belong," the hair-splitting orthodoxies, the thundered anathemas with bell, book and candle, the shutminded anti-scientific stubbornnesses, the emphasis upon God's might rather than on His nature — how all this makes one shudder. Not for one moment do I imply that earnest necessities are to be disregarded or that justice is to be disregarded. But Life at its noblest is more than justice. It is the vine that runs over the wall so that passers-by can pluck off its grapes. It goes two miles when only one is compelled. It is "more than we can desire or deserve."

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Love is law, not coddling favoritism, but even when it surgeons, there's still the demand for beauty in its skill. The iron hand must wear a velvet glove, although its grip will not be less firm. We cannot evade structural minima, but there is something more our souls ask. We must of course take double money in our hand to pay our way, but also it is well indeed to take a bit of balm and honey and spice. There is an old Benediction we may a little adapt, praying we may ourselves be its Amen — "May the Grace of God be in our hands, to minister His healing and His strength. May the Grace of God be in our eyes, to see H i m in His beauty wheresoe'er H e is. May the Grace of God be on our lips. May the Grace of God glow in our hearts. May the Grace of God make our lives Gracious. May peace and beauty, comfort and delight, shine out from us, that all who come in touch with us may touch in us the Grace of God." Take a little balm and a little honey and spices and carry them into all the difficult moments we must face!

XII Be Sure You're Right. Then Go Ahead H E R E ' S no term which needs more careful defini-

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tion than "Conscience." There are too many variant notions tangled up in it, which need unsnarling.

Some are good and some are false or even disastrous to a sane or buoyant life. Once we begin to analyze them we recognize some of these notions are incompatible with each other. There is moral intuition along with subconscious instinct, the "categorical imperative" (to quote Kant) along with wish-thinking, the urge to self-realization along with the conventional codalism of Mother Grundy and ecclesiastical Emily Postism. N o wonder scientists, psychologists and philosophers avoid the word and try to coin some other equivalent in order to indicate only that phase of "conscience" which they recognize. Freud talks of the Censor, the Gestaltists of a patterning urge, others of deep-level forces or standardization or of value-habits. But all must eventually agree that true conscience is from outside the subjective self. It speaks to us. T o those who listen it says "You ought" or "Won't y o u ? " It is not incubated within our

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emotions, mind and will, but works through them. It is an urgency which impinges on attuned awareness. W e watch ourselves being wooed or urged in some given direction and then we choose it or not. Moral intuition grows more vocal and more qualitative as we climb up out of childhood (if we really do) into maturity. It must have some source which is spiritually worth acknowledging as supreme. It must have some explanation more than glandular. Conscience is not identical with conventionality, even if its results look conventional from outside. Much that has been misnamed conscience is conditioning by the current social code. If "everyone" says thus and so, is that our own conscience ? Group-standards are a pressure but not in themselves a compulsion. They may be correct or they may be inadequate but if they are accepted ready-made they are not yet our inner affirmation. Conventions can be wrong: almost every barbarity in the calendar has somewhere at some time been attributed to a sense of obligation which was confused with conscience. Children were thrust into Moloch's fiery maw, and no mother did this lightly. Slaveries of many sorts have been legitimated by scripture texts. Caste is "religiously" based. Heretics have been burned by the codal advocates. Even the best possible code cannot be our actual motivation until we have weighed it and taken it by act of choice. Each of us has to work out his agreement or disagreement for himself.

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Thoreau said, "Before you agree that this is a fine day, stop and think." Conscience is not haloed morbidity. The so-called New England conscience specializes in repressions and prohibitions. Coupled with any Biblical literalism its commandments are lambent with Sinaitic lightnings. Morality thus becomes a hypochondriac anxiety. The morbid suspect anything spontaneous or joyous. Wholesome naturalness is not sublimated and purified upward; it is policed into the jitters. Just as the original Decalogue expanded into Deuteronomy's details and Deuteronomy into the Leviticus Holiness Code of minute commandmentlets; then Leviticus foliated into Torah, Talmud, Mishneh and Targum, so all legalism splits hairs in the name of conscientiousness until naive people feel that Jehovah is a fearsome deity, meticulously demanding our trembling submission. Such scared rabbits go in mortal terror of some "Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin" in letters of flame on the wall of their souls. Henri Bergson strikes a finer note in his distinction between static and open morality. He claims that morality has to be developmental to be right. Squirrel-caged morality is death-dealing to authentic character. If average standards suffice, they are not true conscience. Jesus said, "Except your righteousness exceed the kind of righteousness Scribes and Pharisees vaunt, you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven." He did not imply a completer im-

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peccability; He implied a better kind of Tightness. Open morality is growth by a principle. The code ceases to exist in the minds of those who have found a life of spontaneous self-fulfilment — self-disciplined, thought-through and healthy. For how many of us do most of the awesome statutes of the law need to exist? W e do not need to know they are in the statute-book at all, for we are not down on the level where their commandments have to be iterated to prevent us from becoming murderers or thieves or idolaters, or grossly licentious. W e may not be paragons but we do not have to be in terror of the homicide or vice squad. An on-going ideal or enthusiasm has lifted us above ideas of legal blamelessness. Our type of satisfactions is now under inspiration from a higher source. Socrates' daemon (not demon, please) was constantly speaking to him. It was his comrade, his guide and his inspiration. It led him joyously on his mission. It made sincerity a science. Indifferent to cold and hunger, poor and strange, old Socrates nevertheless persevered, uniquely himself to his utmost, by his daemon's friendship. He died rather than fail his daemon. Conscience of this daemon sort works from the superconscious. Not from the subconscious. Once evaluated by referendum to reason, it becomes a vivid inducement to our best. The Oxford Group uses the concept of Guidance. Its

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theory of the Holy Spirit's word has both merits and dangers. The merits are the insistence on listening quietness and implicit obedience to that Voice, once it has been heard. In usual practice its dangers seem to be the breaking of guidance into small-change, hand-to-mouth immediacies. The loss of a dignified and long-range purpose in momentary, minor dependency on directions makes wishthinking too easy. If all I have to do is to be silent and wait until a thought occurs to me, I must indeed double check it in some selfless way lest wish-thinking be mistaken for the spirit's promptings. Despite the sincerity of those who use this technique it sometimes works out that real decision is more absent than present by reliance upon the oracular. For the subconscious can subtly and deceitfully assume the halo of the superconscious when rationalization camouflages some emotional urge. No, true conscience is not easy to recognize. Truth has quite aptly been symbolized as naked. Clothed in mere conventionality or morbidity or rationalization or guidance-concepts it may be disguised. Psychology has not abolished conscience — not in the least. It has made it more fundamental to personality than ever before. It has given us sane and scientific clarification of the superconscious. It has let us know what the "daemon" is and what it isn't. It isn't a would-be dictator of specific acts or arrangements of events. It isn't the mere social average of customary standards. It isn't an inferiority humiliation, reducing us

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to deflated self-loathing. It isn't our suppressed desires or our guilt-complex or our overwrought nerves. It's high time we stopped our thoughtless twaddle about the "will of God," as if His will were an arranged program or an advance blue-print of seriatim acts which, although inscrutable and unrevealed, we are expected to carry out with exact conformity. God's will is not in externals and mechanical arrangements and time-tables and goose-stepping. It is qualitative. What we do must express what we are or it has no validity at all. God's will is our character. It is personality among persons. It is selfhood at its utmost of worths. It is caliber. And caliber comes only when we use our capacities and powers of selfhood for self-realization and self-fulfilment. Life is a becoming, continually more abundant. Conscience is the creative ideal. If you or I have a problem to decide we must use it as a challenge to decisiveness by our best possible abilities. There is no "submission of the mind" about it and no meek chameleonism on oracular dictation. The decision must be made by us, according to our insight as to its expression of our truest spirit. The decision is right if it is thus morally sincere, even when other people feel it is mistaken. Rightness and mistakelessness are not identical. Righteousness is not anxious codalism but rightness of heart and mind and will. If we have listened to the superconscious and felt its motivation, if we have then checked

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its urgency by our best objective reason, to be sure that we are not individualistic and selfish; if we then put our will behind this selfless motivation we are right, though the heavens fall. We shall have risen to our full stature. We will have achieved character. We will be persons. T h e ideal will have lifted the actual to its level and become our actual self. We shall know, "Thus saith the L o r d " and answer, "Speak, Lord; Thy servant heareth. What wilt Thou have me to be? I will be what I can and should be, T h o u being my helper."

XIII Wayside Brooks PLODDING, dogged, harried man stumbles, straining on under a wicked sun. The heat shimmers about him. His eyes ache with the bitter, piercing brightness. His every muscle throbs in protest at the next leaden step. The hot wind dries his skin to tautness despite his sweat, tight as a drumhead across his forehead. On he struggles, feeling his pursuers gaining on him, on his very heels. If they catch him he will be their slave. Their bonds will be clamped on his wrists and ankles: their chains will cumber and drag. He winces at the dreaded sting of the taskmaster's whip flaying his blistered back. Freedom seems a will-o'-the-wisp. His throat is caked and leather-stiff. His lips are cracked and crusted. Even his painful tongue has long since ceased to moisten them at all. Then to his ears comes the sound of gurgling water. He listens, testing whether it is the tinkle of a tumbling little brook into a pool or his imagination. But he sees a path of green a-ribboning down a gully. A few more steps and at his feet the water glints and twinkles as it slides

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smoothly over wet, brown stones between the crowding sedges! The staggering fugitive flings himself prone beside the threading brook, and drinks with great, sobbing gulps. He wets his forehead and eyes, turning his head blissfully in the coolness of the stream. He plunges in his wrists and cools his pulses. He drinks again, gasping with relief. And stands straight, squares his shoulders and strides on. This is the picture of the hunted soul, pursued by existence, implied by the verse in the Psalm: "He shall drink of the brook in the way: therefore shall he lift up his head." All blessings on the wayside brook! As desert-dwellers yearned for Palestine, "a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths," so we are tempted amidst the aridities and bewilderments of existence to misspell that other well-known verse and say, "So pants the wearied heart for cooling springs." The exhaustion from living in the melee of modernity brings a fatigue-poisoning which lowers spiritual as well as physical resiliency. The moments seem too far apart when we can kneel, drink of the water of Life and in the strength of it lift up our heads and, refreshed, go vigorously, adequately on. But we are "too busy." We no longer vaunt the merely strenuous life, for we have found its tension too tense. If we are to find inner relief it must be in momentary

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interstices between efforts. The brooks must be "in the way." They can be found and utilized. Here's an illustration: we all know the heart is the most ceaselessly busy organ of the body. At approximately seventy beats a minute, its diastole and systole count up forty-two hundred efforts an hour! Only real arithmeticians can compute its annual total. For the whole span of life it pulses on, apparently without cessation. Yet Dr. Cannon of the Harvard Medical School, calling attention to the brief moments of rest between heart-beats, adds up their time and finds that the heart rests more than it works — fifteen hours of relaxation per day to nine of labor! The art of inner renewal must be learned for practice during our wor\. We can and should train ourselves to relaxation between efforts. Do we relax between efforts, or do we keep up the feel of strain between them? Is exertion continued as an emotional carry-over between actions? If so, the next effort starts with the handicap of the last effort's drain and the decrescendo of efficiency grows by the increased fatigue-load. Even if we can only remind ourselves by some motto on the wall or a knot in our handkerchief to

"STOP AND TAKE THREE LONG BREATHS,"

we will feel the blessing of only this much breaking of the obsession of continued stress. There are more opportunities to "let down" than we have utilized. The time on the streetcar, the few moments in the automobile going to the next duty, the glimpses of blue sky between

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crowding office buildings, or even as we plod through the muddy street on our errands a bit of reflected heaven in a mud-puddle, the singing line of a favorite poem in the back of one's head, the smile at a playful puppy frolicking in the snow, of which a glance out of the corner of an eye has given a snapshot in the very midst of a grim problem's discussion, the voice of a child heard through the window of a sickroom — any of these are opportunities for the Water of Life amidst the din and toil of existence. It is better yet, however, to relax to something than merely to relax. More than only to rest is both feasible and recreating. There is better intake for outgo when relaxation is to something refreshing. The fugitive does not only stop plodding; he drinks of the brook in the way. If we are wise we do not sink into passive inertia, but reach out for something invigorating. Even momentarily, we want something more than physical lassitude. We want mental, emotional draughts of Life, for the next task. W e should realize that, whether we realize it or not, relaxation opens the door to something, anyway. Mere relaxation lets the subconscious flow in; purposeful relaxation to something fine lets in the superconscious. When we focus our energies into endeavor we have shut ourselves in into conscious intensity. W e channel our effort. When we relax we draw into our reservoirs the material for later concentrated effort. If relaxation is only that and

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nothing more, the body may indeed have its chance to catch breath and unkink its muscles, but the Self is vague and inert, at the mercy of the subconscious. If relaxation is definitely to something for mind and spirit, the body has its same chance to unknot, nerves have the same chance to release their tautness, but also the true Self has its chance at intake for its needs. This better relaxation is to something with overtones. It is to something above the level of effort. It will quite likely be something super-practical. It will be to something peace-giving beyond strain. It will bless because it inspires (i.e., breaths in) from on High. As J. M. Barrie's mother, Margaret Ogilvie, read her Testament: "She begins the day by the fireside with the N e w Testament in her hands — an old volume with its loose pages beautifully refixed and its covers sewn and resewn by her, so that you would say it can never fall to pieces. (To me, its black threads are as part of the contents.) Other books she reads in the ordinary manner, but this one differently, her lips moving with each word and her face very solemn. The Testament lies open on her lap long after she has ceased to read, and the expression of her face has not changed." We can all find the wayside brook of Beauty. Even in the crack between moments we can catch the glint of it in almost any direction — as the boy Jesus in the apocryphal story shows us. Other children were gathered

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around a dead dog — gloating, I fear, over its repulsive ugliness. But the lad Jesus said, "But see how white his teeth are. They are like pearls." Beauty can be found by looking for it. That is why the man or woman with a painting hobby is so blest. The paintings produced may not be worth keeping or giving away, but the cumulative ability to see color and form all about is worth more than their would-be productions. As an amateur painted one morning on the Gloucester wharves, an Italian urchin looked over his shoulder. "Hey, mister, are you an artist?" he asked. "That is a question," answered the amused dauber. "I mean, d'yer sell them pictures?" the lad kept on. "No, I don't try. Just do it for fun." "Guess you're lucky," chuckled the boy. "You can't guess how lucky," mused the hobbyist; "I don't have to exploit beauty; I can go home and put my canvas in the fire, and I've still had a grand morning with objective beauty." "For to admire and for to see" the seeker of incidental aesthetics goes forth every day, his "eyes peeled" for loveliness others never see. Was it Hamilton Gibson who once wrote, "There are hundreds who have eyes to one who can see; there are thousands who can see to one who can notice; there are ten thousand who can notice to one who can perceive" ? Beauty can be found, to live on, even in minutest portions; but as crystal is crystal in whatever bulk, so is beauty

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beauty no matter how minute the manifestation. And once garnered, it can be remembered in arid times. Reading provides wayside brooks: not the high-pressure, dragooned, feverish reading of the "very latest books," which only increases the strain. It is a pathetic example of mob-mindedness to race through this week's best-seller to be in time for next week's, with the goading dread of falling behind in the nervous pace induced by "book-of-themonth" high pressure insistence. Even a fine book has little chance for justice in this unmeditative drive. And too many of the "modern" novels are without overtones, however much they have undertones, cockily debunking idealism in the interests of reverse Pharisaism. W h o reads the great books? Do we return to the flavorous, mellow, nobler literature, the books Charles Lamb said grace should be said over ? With beauty and strength ? Grace and color? Truth and poetry? W i t h "words as deep waters, as a flowing brook, a well-spring of wisdom?" Poetry is not only rhyme and rhythm. It is the overtone of higher values than the literal. Words may of course be used scientifically for practical purposes, in which case their meaning is contained completely within them. Or words may be used poetically, in which case words are a running start for significance which is "more'n tongue c'n tell." Poetic words are sacramental, they are like the sling with which the soaring meaning is cast beyond the obvious, on into the mystic. Rhythm, color,

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music are of a higher reality than the mundane. There is something of sound and gracious implication which makes true poetry. It must have nobility. I decline to admit that Stein-esque poseurs can attain this. Crass brutalities surely are not restful nor recreating. Is the pretentiousness of such stuff a wayside stream? Don't you still prefer Dante and Aeschylus and the Brownings and Wordsworth and Keats and Shelley and Alfred Noyes and Emily Dickinson and King James English? One of the most overworked and overburdened executives I ever knew, who nevertheless maintained serenity and inner leisure, sat after dinner one day and recited sonnets he had learned on railroad trains, "to keep for leaven" in his urgent hours. As Phillips Brooks kept his Japanese ivory pocket-piece of carven grotesquerie to play with under the table-edge at committee meetings. Another driven man in odd moments exultingly chanted to himself "The Walrus and the Carpenter" in full, then sundry, culled nobilities of minor literature he had gleaned from newspaper verse with the pouncing glee of a connoisseur. "Illogical as mercy and as fair," he repeated to himself, sucking more and more pleasure from an unexpected simile. W e must not too toploftily scorn the banality of the popular songs which the radio and sound-pictures hammer into our ears until they are succeeded by the next newest. After all, they give factory workers something to

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hum at their monotonous detailism, something by which dance-orchestras can tempt tired youngsters to forget mundane prosiness and to lure aching feet into rhythm and rudimentary romance. (What is rhythm? N o one knows, except that it is the pulsing swing to which everything natural, from the constellations to the molecules, gives itself in effortless exhilaration.) This wayside brook may splash and babble, but for some who find no better it is at least transporting. Popular music may not be as ennobling, as assuaging or as re-creative as that which symphony orchestras pour forth, but even symphonies abjure rhythm and melody only at the risk of losing grip on our instinctive appreciation. The personal has more overtones than the impersonal. Nature and all other beauty is best when it gives the suggestion of a God of Grace and of the holiness of beauty. H o w great a tragedy it is if we lose the touch of the personal! We may even forget that people are people, when we deal with them only in a business capacity, in utilitarian service given and rendered, in sub-human exploitation, in dumb indifference, in mechanical regimentations, in wooden usualness! Tolstoy said, "Some think there are relationships in which it is permissible to treat humans on other than the human basis. I tell you there are no such relationships." Jesus honestly liked everyone He knew, even if He did not always approve. He ap-

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proachcd them all with genuine interest and loyal affection, in earnest for their real best. He had no indifferences nor antipathies. Friendship is a never-failing wayside brook. Just to lean back on the remembrance of a true friend is renewing. Whether we can be with our friends as often as we would like or whether we can only let our hearts reach out and touch the fact that they are or were, the flavor and tang of their selfhood refreshes. The person who likes people collects individualities as some enthusiasts collect stamps or early American silver. I would not be without the strengthgiving sight of my gallery of their pictures, on the wall or in my mind, before which I can stop at any moment mentally to genuflect as I taste the uniqueness of this or that indicated friend who has been and is a part of my best life; like Jesus, a most intimate, real, vivid, and inspiring friend, a well of water in me bubbling up with Life! In all of them, God! More's the pity, there are those who even in religion are too prosaic or strainful in their relationship with God himself! How many an earnest wrestler strains too hard in prayer to relax into God! God does not want strainful faith always. God cannot give Himself in His fullness to the feverish petitioner clutching at His skirts. Honest wrestling is preliminary to victorious peace: it is in the peace, God's fullness won, that the flavor of the divine is deliciously tasted.

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How do we say our prayers at night? Do we consider our praying to be only fervent self-examination, penitence and outreach of petition and intercession? On our knees, every muscle tense, every thought a struggle, every emotion at utmost stretch? Ended with an "Amen" of spent exhaustion? If this is in the least our concept of praying, here is a ventured modification of it: It is well to hold our soul up as in God's sight, and calmly to make our diagnosis of its failures and its duties. We must be sure we neither fall into morbidity or too easy self-excusing, and for this we need that calmness which comes only if we stand off from ourselves a bit — of which technique a previous chapter treated. The appraisal of our blessings and duties had likewise best be done unhurriedly and unflustered. May it not come best along with release into God? Either before or after as careful and honest intercession as we are capable of attaining, may it not often be helpful to get into bed, relax one muscle after another until the bed supports a body now as limp as a jelly-fish floating motionless in the sea, then deliberately relax our mind of its tensions until it too is utterly at rest on the thought of God's all-sufficiency and comfort, and we can quietly repeat and feel, "Underneath me are the Everlasting arms." Then wait for the inflow of peace. T o change the analogy, having put ourselves as a dry sponge (the day's work may have squeezed us very dry indeed) into a plate of water, we feel the absorption

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begin! What if we go to sleep so? Could there be any better state than this all night long? The Superconscious saturating the Subconscious, until morning! The secret once learned, we do not need to wait for night for its benefit. Any interstitial moment all day long, from the self-dedication at dawn on through the working hours, whenever we get our pause between heart-beat efforts, we can drop back into the everlasting arms or kneel for a sip of the water of the wayside brook. In between the stepping stones of duties, alongside the flinty path, the clear stream glides. Jesus has abundantly fulfilled His promise of the Living Water. In H i m completely and in all associate christs everywhere and always in their degree there is a fountain of God. The sparkle and the freshness of God wells up. We are reduced to no cemented cistern of stagnant water. Jesus and all His kin are not stale, brackish, walled-in pools but running streams, blithely rippling here and there along the criss-crossing paths of existence, untrammeled, unexpectedly at our very feet; to assuage our thirst, cleanse us, refresh our spirits. May this be so! Drink of the brook in the way. Stop where you stand. It flows just by your heart. And in the refreshing of it, lift up your head! And stride on!

XIV Religion Is the Extension of Our Instinctive Naturalness

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HERE'S nothing "queer" about religion. But religion suffers more than from any other misconception, from the notion that it is of a different kind of life than the natural. To too many it seems over in another field, qualitatively sundered from our naturalnesses. Its words are not in vernacular use in our offices, homes, theaters, or sidewalk comradeship. Religion's vocabulary has become so technical that it seems professional, understood only by those strange folk who are initiated. Theology has grown so esoteric that Dean Inge's assertion seems too accurate that to most people God is only the head of the clerical profession. Churchmanship appears to the outsider as a variety of Freemasonry into which he has not been initiated, whose ceremonies and idiom are part of a claimed magic which is really unrelated to workaday realities. In a very different sense than Karl Barth meant by his phrase, God is the "Wholly Other." Faith is the "submission of the mind" to artificial formulae. So, to common-sense men and women, dis-

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sociated from habitual religious acceptance, seem the affairs of the soul as ecclesiastical practice has presented them. Even in the homiletics class of a theological school the instructor set as one assignment the definition of standard, inherited terms in words such as would be understood by outsiders. It is more of a problem than at first it appears to define what we really mean by Grace, Salvation, Atonement, Absolution, Inspiration, Authority, Revelation, Sin, Righteousness, without using one King James word or cliché. No amount of orotund unction in the utterance of a sonorous dogma now suffices. Who, in any even earnest conversation, would expect the participants to mention the Triune Hypostases of the Godhead ? I remember in my earliest ministry, apprenticed to a realistic senior, he called me into his study one day and sternly bade me sit by his desk. There was a long moment of silence, in which I wondered for what sins of omission I must presently apologize. Then he swung round on me and without warning shot out, "Tell me in words of one syllable, such as our average plodding people can understand: What did the Cross do? and how?" Needless to say, I stammered and stumbled my sudden realization that all I had was the time-worn, accepted dogma. "Find out how to say what you mean in some wording that can be related to this South End or get out," he answered. "You have no right in a pulpit unless you can put the

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central faith of the Church so that it will be something more than 'words, words, words,' no matter how pious they sound!" What a tragedy it is that the noblest truths man's mind has ever wrestled for are today so swathed in wording of another day (when that wording was perhaps natural) that they have not emerged from the cocoon of the dogmatic stereotype! We need the rediscovery of those nobilities of belief and the presentation of them in something other than archeological, scholastic translation. At Pentecost the populace rejoiced because the hearers could cry, " W e do hear in our own tongue the wonderful works of G o d ! " A new Pentecost is due. And the vindication of its affirmation will be that they tie up so naturally with our instinctive traits that we shall cry, "Why, of course!" For religion is true precisely and only as it fits human nature. Anything which is alien to human nature's naturalness is thereby denied validity. Religion is not demeaned but vindicated by being recognized as the next step of our unspoiled spontaneities. Jesus taught in this vein. He was continually relating the ideal to the actual. Did His hearers want to know more of God ? He took them back to their own best traits and told them these were the running start of such knowledge. "What man of you having a sheep that is lost would not go out after it through the dark and the wilderness until he found it ? That's the God in you. God is like that

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with us." Man already knows the near edge of God, only he has not recognized it. In his far look into the infinities he has missed what he already had for clue. Isn't this the best proof of Christianity, that it is so natural? It fits our normal being. Granted that we have to get back to our natural selves out of the blind-alley selfhood of mistakes, sins and deteriorations which we have mistaken for power or modern civilization's vain glory. "Except ye become as little children ye cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven." "Blessed are the unspoiled, for they shall see God." So much of our so-called progress has been into hardness, success-psychology, materialism and implemented subhumanity that we must back out of the cul-desac to find the highroad again. However, when we get back to essential human nature it is humane and flavorous with instinctive faith. For illustration, there is that word "mysticism." It does not mean unreal self-hypnosis. It is not a trance-experience. It is not reserved for a few graduate saints. It is not mawkish, sentimental, hysteric. It needs to be rescued. Those who gaze with cow-eyed "utterly-utterness" into space and murmur, "You know, I'm mystic," may befool themselves into believing they are, but most of us see that they haven't their feet on actual ground. All mysticism really means is the experience of that which lies beyond the grip of the five senses. And we all

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live on this every day. "Things are not as they seem," runs the old-time jingle. Of course not! Preserved in a hermetically sealed glass case in the Library of Congress is a piece of treated sheep's skin with black marks on it made by nut-gall ink. Even if the technique of chemistry and all the other laboratory sciences were to analyze it we should not be content that we had completely known it. It happens to be the Declaration of Independence, with its signatures. What is the reality of that document? Obviously the value-reality is in its historic meaning, its associations, its truths, its bequeathed human story of heroisms and heritage. The value-reality is a mystic experience. In Balzac's tale, "The Quest of the Absolute," Balthazar the medieval chemist is in danger from the mob which imputes Black Arts to him. His poor wife is in an agony of dread for him and herself. She pleads, with tears in her eyes, that he will stop his hated experiments. "Ah!" exclaims the scientist, "Tears! Tears! Well, I have decomposed them. They contain a little phosphate of lime, a little chloride of sodium, a little mucus and a little water. I am not afraid of tears." Our anger at him is automatic. But why are we angry ? Because he has spurned the mystic. The meaning of tears is their value-reality. A kiss is more than "a compression of the closed cavity of the mouth by the cheeks, giving a slight sound when the rounded contact of the lips with one another is

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broken." The crown of England is something more than a circlet of yellow metal with shiny stones in it. Your dead mother's letters are more than rag-paper. A baby's shoe saved for now forty years is more than a piece of steer's hide with buttons. The cross on the altar is something more than a stamped piece of brass. It is the meaning that counts. Mysticism is the meaning of meanings! Insight is the next step beyond sight. Sympathy is the next chapter beyond individualism. Love is gloriously mystic. Faith is the intuitive experience of these worths and the recognition of their meaning. The meaning of meanings is God. "God is love and love is God. And he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God." There's nothing eerie or artificial about that. The Life-impartation is the raison d'être for all its transmissive mechanisms. Without it, why all the labor and brains of its machinery? Take the term "sacramental." Just as mysticism is only the further development of intuitive experience of valuerealities which derive from the spiritual, so sacraments are developments of a usual practice. We use means to accomplish purposes. Things can be used as vehicles of intention, and something happens. For illustration again: A man wants his wife and children to be cared for after his death as if he were still able to fend for them. H e writes his intention into a legal document, has it duly witnessed and leaves it to be probated

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and administered when his mortal days end. It expresses his will for those he loves. So much so that we name the document by its value-reality and call it his "will." What he wills comes to pass. The will is sacramental. It conveys the personal. The sacramental goes even deeper, into the homely details of living. A mother darns stockings. She is putting yarn through the ragged hole in the heel of Sonny's stockings. Sonny is sturdy and active and hard on his clothes. But she would really prefer to have him so no matter how many stockings to darn are involved. The endless darning of stockings is for his further adventure in healthy boyhood. It is not sentimentalist to say she weaves love and hope and pride and prayer into her fabric. The single length of yarn threaded criss-cross- (i.e., Christ-cross-) fashion into the stubby stocking conveys her own inmost life to his. It carries life to life. May we again use the analogy of the written page ? W h o of us has not saved some personally sacred letters, perhaps from those now no longer in the flesh ? When we take up one of these we launch immediately into the mystic and the sacramental. The material is not enough to satisfy our hearts. The texture of the paper, the characteristic flow of lines of letters, the f? ; nt but musty fragrance — these are the findings of the five senses. The interpretation of the pen-scratches is the work of the mind, which deals with meanings. This is mystic. Yet these saved letters

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were not as others now forgotten, which also had meaning. The meaning of the others' markings was not so moving as to lift them above the casual. We were not impelled to save such as read, "Yours of the fifth instant rec'd and noted" or "Be sure to wear your higher overshoes these winter evenings." They had meaning; but the meaning fell short of the sacramental. Such letters as stirred us to the depths were vastly more holy. They spoke the soul of the writer. As we reread them now we feel his or her personal nearness. The presence is not confined inside the envelope which contains the letter: it is associated with it. And the letter conveys it, ever freshly, each time it is read or even touched. There is a life-to-life impartation. Is it, then, a far leap to the bread and wine of a Communion? Sweeping one side all the sacerdotal theories approaching stark transsubstantiation, it is simpler and more real to take the record of the Upper Room as it stands and to deduce the Master's natural meaning when He said, "This is my body and my blood" over the bread and the wine. It is an unsubtle, non-magic saying of a parabolic analogy, "Let this represent my life among you. This means my veriest being." But follow that analogy through! Bread quite evidently has not fulfilled its destiny if it remains bread, even on a silver paten; wine has not succeeded in its purpose if it remains wine, even in a

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jeweled chalice. Bread exists to become strength in the eater; wine to become glow and pulse in his blood. The Master wished to be Bread of Life, Wine of Life. H e transcended the death of His body by making a morsel of broken bread and a cup of shared wine a new body; that is, a vehicle for the spirit. Along with the symbolic elements there was and is a Real Presence, which is not in the bread and wine but associated with the food of fellowship; one loaf, one cup, one Life of which all receive. And He did all this selflessly, conveying the Divine. As in our degree we convey Life, the Divine, by Sacramental means — outward and visible forms with inward and spiritual Grace. Every complete self-expression has three parts: something for the senses to perceive, something for the mind to understand, something for the self to receive and experience. The gifts and deeds and words which fail in one of these three ways are incomplete or prosaically nonsignificant or banal or merely utilitarian. Unless the fault is not with the one who should have been the recipient. Thing-minded persons never get all that is given. They may be blind to meanings and callous to the personal. They have sight but not insight. They are unappreciative. The unappreciativeness of the thing-minded makes many a sacramental nobility null and void, so far as they, the thing-minded, are concerned. Sensitivity is lacking in

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them. They do not attune themselves to the value-realities; they only oafishly and crudely grasp the gift without the giver. "The gift without the giver is bare." Thing-mindedness is a common fault. In our complex and hurried existence, appreciation takes too much time and effort for those who will not take the trouble to penetrate behind externality to find the better reality. The unappreciative man lives in an opaque world; no wonder he comes to the dull conclusion that there is little meaning or fun in it. The thing-minded may indeed grow "efficient" in a hard, executive way. They may use other folk as pawns on their chessboard, impersonally manipulated according to their cold plans. They may be dictators, small or ominously dominant, but they have violated something fundamental, the human-divine. They may go through all their days only vaguely aware that they are materialistic. They may misuse science, the resources of civilization, human relationships with sensory or calculating exploitation, and we know what they have missed. Even for us who do not intend to grow beefyminded the essence of things, their imponderables, may evaporate. In an unspoiled corner of old Scotland, the tale runs, where a belief in pleasant, invisible pixies was still found until our day, many a farmer set aside some corner of his harvest field for the Good Folk to dwell and reap

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their harvest. Such an unreaped corner was called Goodman's Croft. It was a naive custom, yes, and out of tune with modern sophistication. Was it wasteful or Quixotic not to reap every last square inch of field? The crofter might have lost a pint of barley by such foolishness! Current, thing-minded advice would be that a Goodman's Croft in our field of activities is evidence of inefficiency, because we need every last ounce of the crop for our bellies. The old peasant, however, would claim a higher efficiency, that from the comradeship of the neighborly elves there came reciprocal blessings to his good fortune. At least we must admit that there is in his whimsy a help to the mellow, deep-rooted earth-and-human wisdom which stabilizes him. The intangibles are not unreal to him. They save him from the anxiety-neurosis of feverish sorrygo-round whirlers straining for the brass ring. He has some anchor beyond the veil. The focus of this chapter on the mystical, natural realities is the urgency to appreciations. In a now-forgotten play, Alias Jimmy

Valentine,

the

erstwhile bank-robber is called upon to open a vault for his benefactors who are in an emergency. He sandpapers his fingertips. When they are sensitized to the last degree he starts to turn the knobs, able to detect the slightest movement of the hidden tumblers in the great lock. Our sensitized appreciations may be sandpapered by current events and trends or they may be calloused to insensibility

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so that the unlocking of reality may be impossible because we do not feel the tremor of inner worths. Rest assured, the treasure of strong peace is not for rhinoceros-hided, thing-minded people. The man or woman who resolutely carries one step further the natural mysticism and sacramentalism already possessed will find life very different from a "weary, flat, stale and unprofitable" business, "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." It will take resolution. Only practice will perfect it. Realistic idealism will prove a joy forever. Saccharine unrealism on the one side and rocky thingmindedness on the other may be Scylla and Carybdis, but they will be eluded. Appreciations are the oars of the ship of the soul past these looming alternatives, carrying it out into a broader sunlit sea with an infinite horizon of Life's possibility. But we have the equipment with which to start. Already. By nature.